Northern Ireland man in New Orleans tells of being in the biggest snowfall there since the 1800s
While Northern Ireland has been battered by storms, a Belfast man has been caught up in unusual weather overseas – heavy snow.
Stephen Rea has been living amidst a heavy winter downfall that has blanketed New Orleans in white, a southern US city which almost never sees such conditions.
No snowfall of such depth has been seen in the city, which borders the Gulf of Mexico (perhaps to be renamed Gulf of America by President Donald Trump), since the the 19th century.
Only weeks ago Stephen and his American wife Elicia were telling the media back in NI about the sense of trauma in New Orleans after a lone Islamic terrorist ploughed into a crowd of new year revellers on the famous Bourbon Street, killing 15 people.
The writer and teacher, who grew up in east Belfast, told the News Letter: “Living in New Orleans has been surreal the last three weeks. On new year’s day we woke to news of the terrorist attack. This week we week to a scene that the city hasn’t experienced since the 19th century. This amount of snowfall and the record temperatures are something we aren’t set up for down here.
"The houses are built to keep the heat out, not in. There isn’t a single snow plough in the whole state of Louisiana and they are having to bring them in from Arkansas.”
Stephen, who has long followed the Northern Ireland football team at overseas games. left the province as a teenager in the 1980s to work on the Sun newspaper. He has been living in New Orleans for more than 20 years, and wrote a memoir called Finn McCool's Football Club, about a pub soccer team in New Orleans and the players' experiences during Hurricane Katrina.