The storm caught many residents off guard. The night before it started many people thought of the incoming storm as just another winter disturbance - certainly nothing to worry about. But upon awaking the next morning, it was all too apparent, this was not a typical storm.
Gas, electric, and telephone service was lost in many areas and the storm was preventing city and utility workers from getting service restored. People fought for anything and everything to stay warm; some even tore apart and burned furniture in their effort to have some heat. Some people suffered carbon monoxide poisoning by using outdoor grills indoors for heat.
As is ofter the case, amid the horrific conditions, there are tales of heroism and humor along with the tragedy. The Blizzard of '78 tells these stories through firsthand accounts, home movies and archival photographs.
VIDEO HERE (56:55 minutes)
Was this the infamous ice storm?
ReplyDeleteMeanwwhile, the forecasted heavy precip for CA/AZ is a big nothing burger. The coast got some but less than forecast. Unseasonably warm temp keeping snow at upper elevations and not near what was forecast.
Merry Christmas, all y'all.
I remember that storm. Was that bad in Northwest Indiana too. Part of living here, just deal with it. Be prepared or get cold.
ReplyDeleteIt actually happens every 10-12 years.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people don't prepare for storms, even with today's ability forecast them days and days up front.
DeleteModern conveniences act to isolate people from weather or really any unplanned event.
DeleteSo unprepared that a minor inconvenience may become a major threat.
Great rewind video Wirecutter!
DeleteThis is the perfect example of why the Urbanites and city "folks" will be fucked when shit hits the fan!
Well worth the watch.
Was in NW Ohio then. The snow drifted up to the eaves, and we built a ramp from the roof all the way to the hayfield, and iced it well with watering can. Hours of fun. Lots of time around woodstove.
ReplyDeleteI remember the blizzard of '77 in New York State. Google that one! That was when the "experts" said that we were headed for another ice age...
ReplyDeleteYup that’s the one I was thinking about too! Hit southeastern Michigan pretty hard.
DeleteChicagoland was buried too.
ReplyDeleteI was 6 when that hit Akron. I remember the snow drifts were up to the second story of our house and my great uncles came over and had to dig a tunnel to our door. Was a fun time for us kids.
ReplyDeleteI was in Sylvania Township, Ohio (basically Toledo) and spoke with a few of the rescue workers who were picking up people stranded on the road. About one in ten was on their way to some legitimate family emergency. The other nine were on their way to some kind of winter holiday fiasco to the one family member that had a fireplace and firewood. About one third of these had four wheel drive and didn't know how to use it.
ReplyDeleteWe had two fireplaces, plenty of firewood, candles and such. We needed a bulldozer to plow out our 1000 foot driveway.
I remember that fucker.
ReplyDeleteMy sister woke me out of a watm bed to push her Vega down our 100 foot driveway while she spun the wheels.
That still pisses me off.
The Northeast was buried. Where the car was parked there wasn't even a lump on the surface of the snow. We were a young married couple, so we found something to do for the five days we were snowed in.
ReplyDeleteHere in West Ky, that 78 storm dropped over 36". Biggest snow I have seen in my 54 years. Then right after it melted, the first "Flu" I remember hit. We were out of school almost a month between the two. Though the ice storm of '09 was worse, didn't have power at the house for 28 days. The night after the storm it sounded like a war zone with all the trees and limbs breaking. For a couple of years after you would drive through a wood lot and it would look like the old pictures of WW2, with just stripped trunks standing not a limb on them.
ReplyDeleteI was 12 years old, living in Paulding, Ohio. I can remember how the downtown was an unoccupied wasteland for a couple of weeks. I remember walking through belt-high drifts. Fortunately I'd just received my first decent winter coat, a cheap nylon parka that was pretty popular at the time -- had a hood like a snorkel. My winter gear was that coat, blue jeans, and Converse Chuck Taylor Allstar hightops.
ReplyDeleteIn November of that year, I had a “Blizzard Baby”. We’d actually planned for him, but the hospital was filled in the maternity wards.
ReplyDeleteI was an eighteen year old senior in high school working nights in Elyria when it hit. We closed the shop around 11 pm and headed out. Radio said wind chill of minus 65. The driver’s side of my Mustang was a sheet of ice, so I got in on the passenger side and fired her up. Warmed it up for a few minutes and went to try and open my door from the inside. The door handle snapped off in my hand.
ReplyDeleteHeaded home, but came up about a mile short, high centered on a snow drift. Walked the rest of the way. Power out, but dad had the fire place cooking. The rest of the family walked out about a mile the next morning to a friend waiting in a four wheel drive. I stayed at the house and kept it warm so the pipes didn’t freeze.
Took a week for the loaders they were using to clear the snow to get to our house, but I got them to drag my car up to the house without destroying it, so I was pretty happy. Fired it up and off to a buddy’s house to get something to smoke, I’d run out about day two. Never seen anything like that winter in the rest of my life. Eod1sg Ret
No worries. I'm sure that highly unreliable and inconsistent energy produced by solar and wind will keep everyone warm. It's not like the abolition of gas furnaces, wood burning stoves, fireplaces, etc won't cause thousands more to behave stupidly and kill themselves trying to stay warm...and alive.
ReplyDeleteI remember that winter. We had moved from Missouri to the gulf coast of Mississippi in July 1977...and there was snow on the beach that winter, for the first time in decades. I thought "Wow, only 30°F....this is shorts weather."
ReplyDeleteQuick story: That storm. State cop ran off road; stuck in ditch. No tow truck avail. Couple friends rode up on snowmobiles to ask if he needed help. Cop noticed the snowmobiles weren't registered and started to write them a ticket. They left him there. Snowed in for 6 days - Michigan side of Lake Michigan. People wonder why that 2nd floor door doesn't have a balcony.
ReplyDeleteA science teacher I had in 7th grade has his first assignment in Buffalo. He was from Florida. He didn't quite understand why the snowmobile garage was above the regular garage, and why the door was facing away from the lakeside.
DeleteHe found out big time.
I lived in Dayton when that storm hit. Since I had just moved there from Alaska I was unimpressed. I had a little Subaru and I drove it all over the place to see the effects of the storm. No plowing, no traffic, I mean not a single other vehicle. That little Subaru could not get stuck.
ReplyDeleteI remember that storm too -- my mom and dad were driving from Chicago to Detroit in his big Bronco 4x4-on I-94, they were able to move, but other traffic got stuck and closed the road stranding them too.
ReplyDeleteThey said they had plenty of gas, and my father was from the UP of Michigan, so snowstorms weren't unfamiliar to him. But they didn't have clothing for heavy snow with them. After 6-8 hours, they were "rescued" by snowmobilers from a local town, who took them to the local high school where the townsfolks had set up a shelter.
They stayed there over 24 hours for the storm to pass, and then the snowmobilers came back and took them to their stranded vehicles, where the snowplows were waiting for them to move the vehicles, so they could finish plowing
It could have turned out worse for them, but the locals saved the day.
I wonder if the same would happen today ??
Now do the Ice Storm of December, 1989. Where it hard-froze all the way to Orlando after heavy rains and going from 78 to 19 in 8 hours in Central Florida.
ReplyDeleteThat was a complete bitch, all the roads were frozen over, power out, few were really ready for it and the meteorologists said it wasn't gonna happen. The fuckers.
In Jax they shut down EVERY bridge…… it’s near to impossible to get anywhere without crossing a river. There was a 1/4” of snow and the whole county shut down! All quite comical.
DeleteHere in Chicago, people were shooting each other over parking space disputes. The El was shut down. I was working in the loop at the time. Only time in my life I ever wore long johns under a suit. '79 was even worse.
ReplyDeleteHEY MAN !!
DeleteThat's my spot, didn't you see my lawn chair????
Living in N. MA @ the time, in a 3rd story apartment. Me & a couple buds (& our uncle Jack Daniels) were jumping off the porch railing (3rd story) into the drifts behind the house. Took us a while to get back up to do it again, after further liquid refreshment. Nobody broke anything, as I (partially) remember. My ‘67 Grand Prix was invisible, as in completely buried, come morning. That’s a big car, & a lot of snow.
ReplyDeleteI remember it well. The Ohio River froze over at Cincinnati and people were driving their cars across to Kentucky on the ice. My CJ5 tires froze to the ground. I had to put it in first gear low range, rev it up and break it free. Luckily the treads didn't rip off the tires.
ReplyDeleteI was so small I barely remember that, but we got about 5-6 feet south of Boston on the seacoast, and the wind and storm surge had waves breaking 20+ feet over the seawalls in my parents' neighborhood- destroyed about every house within 500 feet of the ocean.
ReplyDeleteMy father, who spent his 20's to his 40's at sea, had no interest in looking at the ocean in his off time. We were almost 1000' from the beach.
A friend and I were skiing in VT all during that storm. Knee to thigh deep powder and mostly no one on the trails or lifts because the Governors of MA and most of New England shut their states down. Pure heaven.
ReplyDeleteThe only down side was we had to shovel our way out in the AM and shovel again in the PM to get back into the driveway at our rented lodge. On day two we were riding up the Killington peak chair and saw someone fall. The person disappeared in the snow. Couldn't see any evidence that he was there except for a slight disturbance in otherwise smooth snow scape. We watched the TV news at night and were laughing at all of the cars buried on a major road southeast of us. About a week after the storm, I went to visit my folks. There was still 6-7 feet of snow in their front yard with a two foot wide shoveled path to their front door.
Nemo
My mom and her girlscout troop were staying in cabins near Mount Washington during this blizzard. She and the other girls were snowed in for over a week. My grandma still complains about it every time we get a dusting of snow.
ReplyDeleteRemember it well. We were living in eastern Ohio, near Youngstown. That was the main reason we moved to Texas. I was working midnight turn at a steel mill and it took me over 3 hours to drive about 5 miles to get home. Ran out of room to shovel snow in the driveway. Throwing it way up over my head on both sides. Took weeks to melt. An event to remember.
ReplyDeleteLived in the NC Foothills then. It snowed for 6 straight Wednesdays in Jan-Feb. Didn't get above freezing for 10+ days. Drove a '73 Corolla with a 24-quart case of motor oil in the trunk to get traction.
ReplyDeletePretty sure this is the same storm I am thinking of, late January or early February 1978. I was in college in New Brunswick, NJ. First and only year living in on-campus dormitory because reasons. Snowed in, guy across the hall had a VW Beetle with snow tires. We were on the campus on the north side of the Raritan River so we had to cross the warp drive bridge to get to Crossons' Liquor Store - someone must have called ahead to see if they were open and had kegs. I recall standing on the back bumper of that VW with 2 or 3 other guys for extra traction plowing through the snow. A full keg was procured with pooled pocket change and a good time was had by all dorm residents that chipped in. If you ever ate at Greasy Tony's, you know that Crossons' was right down the street. . . . .
ReplyDeleteI was in Traverse City, Michigan, some 200 miles north of Ohio. I don't remember a storm on that date in particular, but I sure remember that winter. There was one big storm right after another for over a month. This is a small town, with an even smaller population that stays there year-round. It's very well equipped for snow removal, but the streets were getting dangerously narrow because even those big plows that look like a 4-legged spider couldn't push the snow back any further. This was the first time since my family moved there in 1963 that the city had front-end loaders filling dump trucks to drive it out into the country somewhere.
ReplyDeleteBut that winter wasn't the reason I joined the Air Force and flew away from Michigan. It was that while I was growing up, the runaway inflation of the Johnson economy became the terrible Nixon economy, followed by the terrible Ford and Carter economies. Whatever LBJ did to mess up the jobs in small towns, it was dreadfully permanent.