As of Friday afternoon forecasters were calling for 12 to 18 inches of snow, beginning late Saturday or early Sunday morning and lasting into Monday.<\/a><\/p>\nIt\u2019s a potentially dangerous storm, certain to disrupt traffic and air travel. Bitter cold temperatures with lows in the single digits will make the chore of shoveling out all the more unpleasant, and power outages are always a possibility.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll the big items are on order,\u201d said an employee at Tractor Supply, where the phone rang without pause as the population of the greater Lehigh Valley called in search of supplies: snowblowers, propane, salt, shovels, flashlights.<\/p>\n
Some of these things were available and others weren\u2019t, but the 11th-hour rush underscored the lesson that for many of us, the slogan \u201cbe prepared\u201d doesn\u2019t survive our scouting years.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re anticipating more [salt] but the demand is always higher than the supply,\u201d said the employee, who asked his name not be used in keeping with store policy.<\/p>\n
A customer named John, who has his own policy of keeping his name out of things \u2014 his full name, anyway \u2014 said he was ready for the storm but low on Duraflame firestarter logs.<\/p>\n
He lives on a rural area and knows better than to be caught unprepared.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve got plenty of firewood, plenty of water,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve got water to flush the toilet if I need it.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the parking lot, Sean McFillin of Nazareth put a couple of jugs of ice melt in the back of his car. He said he likes to keep the sidewalk in front of his house as clear as possible for dog-walkers heading to the nearby borough park.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, his wife was braving the eggs-and-milk crowds at a supermarket.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re going to make Guinness Irish stew on Sunday,\u201d he said. \u201cIt seems like a nice thing to do while we wait to see how much snow comes down.\u201d<\/p>\n
At Azar\u2019s, Tatiana Elias, one of the managers, said 12 pallets of rock salt went quickly. She was busy restocking bread, one of the traditional go-fast items on the eve of a storm.<\/p>\n
\u201cI got my bread, I got my milk and I shoveled the old snow this morning to make space for the new snow,\u201d said customer Zee Maddah.<\/p>\n
He and his husband, Pat Romano, drove over from Palmer Township for a few items because other stores had already been pretty well ransacked, according to Romano.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey started yesterday,\u201d he said. \u201cThe Walmart was bald. All the bread and milk was gone.\u201d<\/p>\n
Romano said it\u2019s nice to have bread and milk on hand during a storm, but he\u2019s never been snowbound for very long.<\/p>\n
\u201cGenerally in a big storm we\u2019re out in 24 hours,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat\u2019s big deal? You\u2019re going to starve without a loaf of bread?\u201d<\/p>\n
Morning Call reporter Daniel Patrick Sheehan can be reached at 610-820-6598 or dsheehan@mcall.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By and large, people only think about rock salt a few times a year. Then they think of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":94906,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[153,155,154,433,182,139,434,28,432,1133],"class_list":["post-94905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bethlehem","tag-bethlehem","tag-bethlehem-headlines","tag-bethlehem-news","tag-lehigh-county","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-northampton-county","tag-pennsylvania","tag-top-stories-tmc","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94905"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94905\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/94906"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}