“I think everybody’s just kind of annoyed by it,” said Kent Flake, the commissioner of streets in St. Louis, where crews began pre-treating the roads Friday morning ahead of an expected 6 inches of snow.
Flake, an 18-year veteran of city government, said he could not recall a St. Louis winter with more storms. All that snow and ice, he said, have left behind about three times as many potholes as normal.
In Kansas City, Missouri, where up to 5 inches of snow and sub-zero temperatures were expected, the National Weather Service urged people to stock up on bread and milk. “We have been through this drill before,” the agency wrote on Twitter. In Peoria, Illinois, where snow was possible Saturday into Sunday, the city sought nominees Friday for the “Golden Shovel Awards,” honoring residents “who are going above and beyond to keep the sidewalks clean.” And in the Minneapolis area, where the snowiest February on record had just ended, according to local news outlets, March began with more snow and frigid temperatures.
Even in places where weekend snow was unlikely, the forecast did not inspire much enthusiasm. In Chicago, forecasters warned of sub-zero wind chills early next week, cold enough to cause frostbite, and said spring-like weather was at least a couple weeks away.
The National Weather Service has issued winter storm watches or warnings for the Midwest to the West, including St. Louis; Kansas City; Wichita, Kansas; Denver; Cheyenne, Wyoming; and South Lake Tahoe, California. The service has also issued flood warnings along some of the rivers in the South; the waters of the Mississippi River are running especially high.
“It’s not that uncommon to have a storm tracking from the West Coast to the East Coast,” said Paul Walker, a senior meteorologist at AccuWeather.
The storm is expected to make landfall on the West Coast on Friday night, Walker said. It will take until Sunday night to reach the East Coast, where it could bring a messy commute Monday morning. But he cautioned that there remained much uncertainty about the storm.
Before the front arrives, the New York metro area could wake up to snow and rain showers Saturday morning.
While New Yorkers are accustomed to late winter weather, snowy conditions last month in typically warmer states surprised residents.
In Los Angeles County, it snowed, oh so briefly, on Feb. 21 in Malibu, West Hollywood, Pasadena and Northridge, and the flakes mostly melted quickly. Los Angeles had not seen snow since January 1962. The silver lining of snow in California? The 6 to 10 feet that has fallen in the Sierra Nevada this winter has erased the drought conditions for most of California, Walker said, and so the state should not be as dry this summer, as the snowpack melts.
Hawaii had a midwinter storm that saw a 191-mph wind gust, 60-foot waves and snow on Maui. The snow may be the greatest accumulation seen at that low an elevation on Maui.
In the Southwest, Flagstaff, Arizona, received more than 30 inches during a storm in late February. The National Weather Service said that the Phoenix area had not had snow since 2015. The same storm that dumped nearly 3 feet in Flagstaff gave Las Vegas its first measurable snow in more than a decade.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.