As Sunday’s snowstorm approached, residents in Berks and across southeastern Pennsylvania were urged to brace for a potentially crippling winter blast.

Headlines echoed National Weather Service warnings that the nor’easter could be “potentially historic” and “crippling,” bringing blizzard-like conditions from early Sunday into Monday afternoon.

By Sunday afternoon, however, with nary a flake falling in Berks, forecasters began tempering their predictions locally.

A blizzard warning remained in effect for Philadelphia-area counties — including the eastern half of Montgomery County — and most of New Jersey, but Berks appeared increasingly likely to see less impact.

By then, school districts in Berks had already canceled in-person classes for Monday. County leaders announced offices and courts would close, and many municipal offices followed suit.

When light snow began around 4 p.m. Sunday, the revised forecast of 5 to 8 inches in Berks already seemed doubtful.

What materialized instead was a fairly ordinary winter storm, delivering a few inches of wet, slushy snow. Snow brushes proved more useful than shovels.

Thanks in part to pretreatment by road crews Sunday night, pavement on Routes 222, 422 and 183 was mostly clear by Monday morning. Traffic, however, was only a fraction of normal.

Hundreds of outages occurred. According to FirstEnergy’s website, the number of Berks Met-Ed customers without power drew down from about 1,000 around daybreak Monday to fewer than 500 at 10 a.m. to fewer than 100 at 1:30 p.m. Most of the remaining outages were in Exeter and Hereford townships.

Reports to the National Weather Service showed these totals in Berks:

Reading Regional Airport (Bern Township), 2.6 inches

Blandon, 3.5 inches

Mertztown, 4.3 inches

Birdsboro, 4.8 inches

Huffs Church, 7.7 inches

Elsewhere, the storm packed more punch. Double-digit snowfall totals were recorded as predicted in Philadelphia, lower Bucks and eastern Montgomery counties after the system tracked farther east than earlier forecasts suggested. Fairless Hills received 18 inches, while Levittown saw 15.

New Jersey bore the brunt. Nearly every county, from Cape May to Sussex, reported double-digit totals, with as much as 1½ feet recorded in several locations.