APOD: 2018 January 21 - The Upper Michigan Blizzard of 1938

APOD: 2018 January 21 - The Upper Michigan Blizzard of 1938

A meter of snow? That's "flurries" in upstate New York. In 1966, Oswego county, near my home, got 102 inches in one storm. And that was on top of another storm, six days earlier, which had dropped 18-24 inches.

In my actual home town, we were snowed into the house. My house had a garage which was attached to the house, but without a passage from the house to the garage, where we kept our shovels. (Heaven knows why they didn't just build a door between them. It was built in the 30s. Maybe that wasn't a thing then.) My dad and I had to drop onto the garage roof from an upper story window, then search for a leeward spot next to the garage where we could slide down without being trapped in a drift. We then had to use our hands to crawl through the snow to one of the garage's two human doors. Once we had shovels, the first thing we had to do was to dig out a path to go in and out of the house, because we could not get back in the way we got out, and we knew we'd have to go back inside many, many times during the course of snow removal. I don't remember how long it took to clear that pathway plus the driveway, but it was probably close to a day. Heaven only knows how people got out of one-story houses, or how elderly people dug their way out. Probably through the kindness of strangers.

And the most frustrating part of the exercise was that it didn't really matter. Unbeknownst to us when we began the exercise, the snow plow didn't get to our street until five days later, so we couldn't leave our cleared driveway even if we wanted to. Although we lived on the corner of a primary and a secondary road, our driveway was on the side street, and almost every secondary road was closed at least five days. Schools were closed for an entire week. Most major stores were closed for several days, if not that entire week, but small neighborhood stores and restaurants gradually got back into business and opened for foot traffic, providing people with food and other essentials.

I don't remember anything about how the hospitals persevered, but I do remember that, miraculously, not many power lines went out. I think we had heat and lights during the entire ordeal.