Will this snowstorm be one we'll talk about for years to come?
MINNEAPOLIS -- Minnesota is no stranger to big snowstorms. Who can forget when the old Metrodome collapsed? Or the 1991 Halloween blizzard?
WCCO's Esme Murphy covered both storms and found there's a number of things those storms changed to make us better prepared.
Murphy, 31 years ago, described Interstate 94 after the Halloween blizzard as "in pretty good shape, we found driving there pretty easy."
Today, she said she wouldn't describe I-94 as looking anything resembling good. But that was another era. There were no cellphones, so people who were stuck couldn't call for help. Few people had four-wheel drive, so getting around was nearly impossible.
But kids like 8-year-old Katie Pringle of St. Paul didn't mind.
"I like pulling my sled around and making forts. (Not going to school is) fun too," she said.
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Three decades later, Murphy found Katie Pringle-Long, now a new mother and physician's assistant, in Alabama, far away from the winter weather.
"It was really snowy when we were trick-or-treating, but the next day when we opened up the blinds that the whole world was just white," she said.
And then in 2010 came the collapse of the Metrodome from the weight of 17 inches of snow. It was about 5 a.m. on a Sunday. Murphy says she was in the newsroom with producers Tracy Perlman and Joan Gilbertson, and they sent a photographer to check it out. From the ground he couldn't tell, but after climbing to the top of the highest nearby parking ramp, he called back to report the Metrodome roof had indeed gone down with the snow.
So how will this snow stack up?
If we get 20 inches exactly from this system, it would be good enough to tie the second of two consecutive snowstorms that hit the Twin Cities in January of 1982. (Those two waves resulted in 37.4 inches, which is significantly more than even the famed 1991 Halloween blizzard.
If the metro area stalls out at 15 inches, it would still be good enough to enter the top 15.