St. Agatha man keeps tabs on weather

ST. AGATHA – Ricky Chamberland is no weather prognosticator, but he can tell you the weather in his town, day to day, season to season for the last 13 years.

Chamberland doesn’t work for the National Weather Service, but his records could be part of its archives for the mid-Saint John Valley area.

According to his records, St. Agatha has received 125 inches of snow this season, starting back on Nov. 5 when 10 inches fell. It allowed snowmobilers to hit the fields, and snowplows to hit the roads.

That’s 10 feet, 5 inches of snow this year. Snowbanks are high along town and state roads in the small town. Between snowstorms, he and his crew push back snowbanks and clear areas around intersections and dangerous driveways.

Chamberland was still getting calls Monday morning about trouble spots created by nearly 4 feet of snow that fell last week.

He was also clearing the snow from the yard of the municipal garage, an area that had not received much attention last week.

Chamberland is Public Works foreman in St. Agatha. His John Deere calendar, from Frank Martin and Sons at Fort Kent where he acquires a lot of his snow removal equipment, is filled with weather information for his town.

Each day is filled in, since he started keeping records in 1992, with the high and low temperatures, precipitation amounts, whether there was sun and other general small notes.

His 2004 and 2005 calendars are still on the wall. A desk drawer in his office holds all the other calendars from 1992.

“I just started doing this one day,” he said on the weekend. “Where do you want to start?” he said, as he fingered through the months in 2005 and 2004. “Let’s see, the first good snow we got this year was on November 5 and we had 10 inches.”

Two more inches fell in November. In December, three snowstorms dropped 10, 7 and 16 inches. Other smaller spurts of snow in November dropped another 7 inches, and 52 inches of snow fell in December.

January was the lightest snowfall of the season with 11 inches. February was also a small month for precipitation with 12 inches on Feb. 11, and 7 more inches here and there that month.

In March, and we are only 14 days into the month, the small St. John Valley town along the shores of Long Lake got hit with 43 inches of snow.

There was 10 inches on March 1, 7 more inches on March 6 and 7, and 26 inches during a 24-hour period on March 7 and 8.

Chamberland and Roger Chasse, his assistant in the Public Works Department, got some well-earned rest on the weekend.

“You should have seen his eyes Wednesday night,” Chasse said. “They were real small and red.”

“We both were pretty tired after that big snowfall,” Chamberland said Monday morning. “We had had it. I didn’t do much on the weekend, except sleep.

Chamberland and Chasse were in good spirits Monday.

They two men, along with a part-time helper, Jason Daigle, went minute for minute Tuesday and Wednesday for nearly o 36 hours. They also had been on the roads Sunday and Monday to take care of smaller amounts of the white stuff.

Meanwhile folks in southern parts of the state were promised a respite as forecasts called for a period of quiet weather after a series of storms that left people wondering whether spring would ever arrive.

The heaviest accumulations from the Saturday storm fell in York and Cumberland counties, with most communities reporting 10 to 20 inches.

Portland got 12.5 inches, according to the National Weather Service, raising the total for the winter to just over 102 inches. That’s the first time in nine years, and only the 14th time in 123 years of record keeping, that Maine’s largest city has had more than 100 inches in a season.

Forecasters said no major storms were expected within the next few days, although some areas could see snow showers as temperatures remain on the low side. Meteorologists were looking ahead to a possible storm late in the week.

The latest storm began as snow Friday night, then changed to rain and mixed precipitation in some places and even stopped completely at times.

But the snowfall picked up steam after daybreak Saturday and reached its height at midday, when an inch or 2 an hour fell over much of southern Maine.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.