Good morning! Happy Thursday. It is partly cloudy and 20 degrees in Delmar.

Partly sunny, with a high near 23. West wind 13 to 18 mph. Chance of precipitation is 30%. Total daytime snow accumulation of less than one inch possible, mostly occuring before 3 PM. Sunset will be at 5:22 pm with twilight at 5:51 pm which is one minute and 19 seconds later then yesterday. Tonight will be partly cloudy, with a low around 7. Wind chill values as low as -3. Northwest wind 7 to 16 mph.

There are 4 days until It’s Presidents Day. Certainly going to be a frigid one. Good for the ice for ice fishing but not much else. At least natural gas and heating oil is inexpensive this year, and most of the winter has been mild.

This day in energy history in 1808, Jesse Fell burned the first anthracite coal in an indoor fireplace, setting off a revolution in heating and eventually fueling the industrial revolution. Coal would save America’s forests, which were being decimated by demand of wood for heating and the production of heat for making steel.

Also on the energy front, in 1981 at TVA Sequoyah Nuclear Power Plant in Tennessee, approximately 100,000 gallons of radioactive water spilled when a cooling pipe broke, poisoning eight nuclear workers and furthering the public’s concern with nuclear power – coming only four years after the melt down at Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant.

On the politics front in 1812, Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry “gerrymanders” for the first time with his proposal for new State Senate district lines around the City of Boston. The lines would be deemed gerrymandering by the Boston Gazette on March 26, 1812.