■Celebrating the 84th anniversary of the famed blizzard of 1888, the fourth major snowstorm of the winter swirled into the Northeast yesterday dumping from 9 to 12 inches of snow on Hampshire County by early this morning. All area schools with the exception of Amherst and the Central Berkshire Regional Schools were closed today.
■Mario C. Aquadro, longtime director and member of the security committee of the Northampton Co-Operative Bank, was presented a bronze plaque by chairman of the board William E. Dwyer, at the annual meeting Monday. Aquadro, who was first elected a director and named a member of the Security Committee in 1957, is retiring from the post.
■Neighborhood opposition to replacing the Old Springfield Road Bridge with a larger span has failed to alter state construction plans. The city Board of Public Works voted unanimously last night in support of the state plan for a longer, two-lane span that will include a sidewalk.
■If horse racing is to survive at the Three County Fair, the fair needs a bigger cut of the handle, the president of the fair told the Government Regulations Committee yesterday. Bruce R. Shallcross of Conway testified in favor of a bill filed by Rep. Nancy Flavin, D-Easthampton, to boost the share the fair and racers receive from the pool of money bet on horse races.
■Pelham writer Joe McGinniss, author of “The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin,” and “Blind Justice,” “Fatal Vision” and others, is spending much of 2012 at the Hampshire Superior Court. He is working on his latest book, “15 Gothic Street,” in which he hopes to convey some of the ritual and pomp of courtroom proceedings to people who may never have stepped inside one.
■Elevated levels of polluted wastewater flowing from Coca-Cola’s expanded bottling plant are becoming costly for the city of Northampton to treat and prompting local officials to take a hard look at new surcharge rates, according to the Department of Public Works. The BPW is discussing whether to increase one surcharge rate and create a new kind of rate for customers with elevated concentrations of wastewater pollutants.