You said that 1/2" of sleet in more damaging that 3 ft. of snow.
Why is this?
I don't know much about inclement, cold weather.
Not sleet as much as freezing rain. Freezing rain does exactly what it says - it freezes on contact. When I left work yesterday it had literally been raining for less than five minutes. The ice on my car was so thick it took me 10 minutes to scrape it off so I could leave.
Snow, even wet sticky snow, will fall off things and not accumulate. Think about a power line and then start tying five pound bags of ice to it...over and over. Same thing with trees. It sticks to everything eventually killing trees, snapping power lines.
The one thing you'll find in areas like Maine, NH, Vermont that people dred the most are ice storms.
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