which a spokeswoman said was &quot
 

Take that. "Whatever slush there is will freeze unless they treat it," said Art Kraus, National Weather Service meteorologist. They will, of course, treat most of it. The city Streets Department and the state Department of Transportation had enough manpower and equipment standing by yesterday to vanquish a blizzard. But in Philadelphia, we barely got enough snow to measure at International Airport. Actually, it was more slush than snow. Certainly not enough to have snarled traffic, although some city secondary streets were slippery enough to delay trash collection. Most area schools closed for the day. In some suburbs roads actually were treacherous. There, like most of the East, the storm dumped several inches of snow and ice. It was cold. Winds gusted. Businesses closed. Airports shut in Pittsburgh, Baltimore and New York, delaying some Philadelphia flights. Ice tore down power lines on Amtrak's Northeast Corridor, stranding thousands of passengers and stacking up trains on the busy Boston-to-Washington route "like cordwood," said a spokesman. PECO said 18,000 customers lost electricity, which a spokeswoman said was "pretty good, considering the weather." In Philadelphia, the thousands of students and teachers who enjoyed the holiday can thank gale-force hype. For two days, television and radio weather forecasters had been bleating about a major storm that would swoop up the East Coast and nail us. The forecasts, of course, inspired panicked talk, supermarket runs, city overtime and snow shovel sales. And like last week, they were wrong. Here's why we dodged the snow bullet: The storm was driven by twin low pressure systems that drove north from the Gulf of Mexico on Monday. They slowly moved north, roughly following Interstate 95, gathering moisture from the Atlantic Ocean. In places where cold air was in place - Pennsylvania west of here, New York, New England, North Jersey - the precipitation from the storm was snow. But in Philadelphia, the temperature hovered around freezing. Accu-Weather Senior Meteorologist Ken Reeves explains: "The last time I checked, Philadelphia was fairly close to an ocean. The ocean, during the winter, is a source of warmth. Water chills more slowly than land, so when wind comes off the water, it pushes temperatures above freezing. It brings in air that is moderated enough so that it prevents the immediate Philadelphia area from having problems. "As you go up in elevation, the air condenses and and gets cooler. That's why there were problems in places like Manayunk, Roxborough and Chestnut Hill, but not Center City." There. All those eighth-graders who had off yesterday could have told you that from Earth Science.