bram

The last time it was that cold, a decade ago, it made the rear glass door of my Cambridge apartment shatter. Fortunately it was double-glazed and only the outer pane went. Unfortunately I wasn't there to see it happen. But it was a freakish occurrence. The temperature had dropped something like twenty degrees Fahrenheit in about an hour while I was visiting a friend. When I came back, the tempered glass of the outer pane had all cracked into quarter-inch-wide bits, which were still mostly holding together like puzzle pieces in a network that sagged and bulged out from the frame. I had to knock them out of the frame just to open the door.

I'm pretty sure that somebody didn't just toss a rock at the door or something, because the door was recessed into the ground in a well that was invisible from the street, and people rarely went back there apart from me.