Epic Storms
I was deciding on what to write about today when I realized the most appropriate thing I could talk about was the upcoming storm. I’m talking about a snowstorm which has been predicted to affect the lives of 75 million people. When you hear numbers like this you realize what a large population the United States has. 75 million people are more than the population of many countries. There have been many huge snowstorms in the United States over the years. I have mentioned this before, but I remember when I was growing up in Brooklyn, New York where huge piles of snow were stacked up as the Department of Sanitation plows did their job on the snow. I wouldn’t exactly call it snow removal, it was more like, “hey let’s move the snow around.” I say this because those mounds would stay there for days and sometimes weeks until they finally begrudging melted completely. As kids we used to love to climb to the top of them and they were so high you could look into the second and third story windows of apartment buildings which were next to them.
When you are a child everything does look bigger so I’ve talked to others in the same area and they have the same memories. The coming snowstorm is being called epic, but the East Coast of the United States has had quite a few of these epic storms even in my lifetime. Some states are better prepared than others, because occasionally one of the storms will wander into a state that usually doesn’t get very much snow and therefore doesn’t have the equipment to remove it. In 2010 the New York Times ran a headline on February 5 which stated “East Coast is hit by potentially epic snows. They were talking about with they called the largest winter storms the mid-Atlantic region had seen in decades which swept through Washington and Baltimore. Those places were racing to get enough salt to deal with the problem. The National Weather Service said tonight into Saturday morning will be about as dangerous as winter weather can get around here. I wonder if this is what they were saying to each other as the present storm was crashing into Washington DC.
One of the problems besides snow is the fact that you often get rain and high winds and if you are really unlucky will get high tides, depending on the position of the moon. There are some places on Long Island where the tides are going to be high during the storm and some of these places were devastated in the last hurricane which was Katrina. While most have been repaired some of these residences are still waiting for part or all of the money they had to lay out for these repairs. I have to say there are people who buy houses in well-known flood areas and I believe when they take a risk like this it shouldn’t be incumbent on the government to have to reimburse them for damage due to flooding. If a person buys a house in an area like this should they even qualify for federal flood insurance? Sometimes nature just doesn’t want structures put into certain places. Many times people in my area don’t just get snowstorms, they get blizzards. The difference being a blizzard is not just a storm, it has very low temperatures, strong winds, blowing snow, whiteouts and it buries cars and homes.
In 1888 people in the Northeast were hit with the Great Blizzard which produced the biggest death toll in United States history for a winter storm. It was at its worst between March 11 and March 12 and dumped about 50 inches of snow in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York. 400 people died during this blizzard and 200 ships sank, because of the waves whipped up by the fierce winds. The snow was so deep in places because of drifts, it buried entire trains and houses. Would a storm like this have killed as many people today? This is a hard question to answer, but I think not because many of the homes in those times didn’t have sufficient heating and I believe people were not as aware of the danger of heart attacks from shoveling snow too vigorously.
The next year in 1899 a storm hit which is known as the Great Blizzard of 1899. The storm shut down the eastern seaboard from Georgia to Maine. The temperatures were so low they shattered records. The snow actually started in Florida and moved north and by the time it reached Washington DC it dropped 20 inches on that city in one day. When it reached New Jersey it dropped another 34 inches. By this time people in the area must’ve been very scared because they knew what happened the year before when all those people died.
When we look at unique storms, nothing could be more unique than a storm which hit us on March 12, 1993. The reason the storm was so unique was because it was a blizzard and a cyclone. It was called The Storm of the Century and caused much damage in Cuba all the way to Canada. It was as strong as a hurricane and killed 310 people causing $6.6 billion in damage. It surprised a lot of people, because it hit just one week before the spring. Luckily more deaths were avoided because the National Weather Service was able to predict in advance to severity of the storm and a state of emergency was declared before the storm hit.
As you can see these blizzard type storms can be quite dangerous. I only named a couple but there have been a lot more like the one that hit the Great Lakes 1913 killing 250 people which was a blizzard with hurricane force winds. Then there was the Children’s Blizzard of 1888 where the temperature in the Dakota Territory in Nebraska dropped from above freezing to a wind chill of -40° and caught thousands of people unprepared for the cold weather including schoolchildren who were sent home during the storm. It killed 235 people, many of them children.
As bad as things can get in the Northeast it is much worse when a storm of this nature pounces on an area which is not used getting storms like this. I don’t know how the storm tomorrow will turn out, but it may be one you will someday be able to tell your grandchildren about.
