The Catastrophic Blizzards of Winter 1977-78: An Analysis

Why do they have a middle schooler giving this report, there are labor laws you know….

The devil was trying to kill me. I was in the womb

Was an 11yr old in the small town foothills of the then sparsely populated Berkshire mountains. I remember this time distinctly and not just for helping Dad shovel a ginormous amount of snow just to get out the doors to the house. We were fortunate to heat our home with a wood stove three rooms w blankets to block the rest of the house to conserve firewood consumption. (We would see our breath waking up winter morning. It was not unlike sleeping outside. We loved it and thought it completely normal.) Snow piled like mad, drifts high on our windows. Up to the roof against the garage. Toboggan sledding was epic schools were closed all of us kids were stoked, we tackled hills we wouldn’t dare ride down on the usual crusty New England ice snow. Any kid with ambition made bank clearing walkways 😅. Grew w farming and w Depression era Grandparents so we had deep stores of jarred and canned food, potatoes etc not all were so fortunate many suffered loss of work, power and didn’t have the firewood option and hadn’t grown up early 1800s style like we did so it was a shock to them. Train yourself to be comfortable w the uncomfortable thats my two cents.

The house I currently live in (my wife’s family home) was completely buried by the snow drift. 25ft drift. I lived about 1 km North, so we only had about 8 feet. I was only 8, but it was epic. I later remember seeing snow drifts that were higher than power lines, closer to the lake.

When that blizzard hit Ohio, I was in graduate school at The Ohio State University, in Columbus, Ohio. It was "winter break" for us who were attending school. Hours before the big blizzard had fully buried Columbus, I began driving towards Cleveland, Ohio, where my folks live, to spend my break from school with them. The snow was already falling at a steady clip, but early-on the Ohio highway snow plows, were keeping roadways clear. I embarked on my trip to Cleveland on Route I-71, around 1PM, and I had two friends with me, fellow grad students, who would be joining me and my family for the duration of the our time off from school. In 1978, the highway speeds were only at 55 MPH, as we were still abiding by measures to reduce our gasoline consumption. The trip to Cleveland from Columbus, even with the lower highway speeds, meant our trip should have only taken 2-1/2 hours. My family lived in an eastern suburb of the actual city of Cleveland. So I would take Route I-71, to an "outer belt", named Route 270, to arrive in the suburb named University Heights.
We were driving in my 1970 sub-compact car, a German import car, known as an Opal Kadette, it had a stick shift, and was a 4 speed. We managed to drive half way to Cleveland, on I-71. The snow was falling fast and heavy, with large flakes of snow. There were blowing squalls of snow obliterating my views out the front windshield, and my wipers struggled to keep it clear. The heater and defroster worked great, but the wind chills, meant the windows became caked with snow, that would melt a little bit, and re-freeze. We pulled off the road along the berm every 20 minutes to scrape the newly accumulating snow, that had re-frozen. By this time there were no other cars on the road, that I could see. In fact earlier on, I relied the red rear lights of other cars, ahead of me, to orient myself on the roadway. Without them acting as a beacon for me to follow, it was easy to become disoriented,….as my headlights were only illuminating the continuous veil of snow, that was falling all around. The actual roadway, the black top, had long ago been buried, by inches of thick, wet snow. There are no street lights overhead on highways, except near the exit ramps. So you are driving in almost total blackness, most of the time. Under normal circumstances your head lights illuminate the painted road lane markers, down the center of the road, and there is a continuous road edge reflective stripe, one can always see as well, defining the edge of the roadway. Our trip which should have taken only 2 & 1/2 hours, turned into an epic one, that lasted 6 hours. We didn't pull off the road to seek shelter at any of the roadside public lavatories. Those public bathrooms, didn't have any amenities, often they weren't heated, and didn't have vending machines, and if there was a public pay phone, it was often vandalized. So we weren't going to waste any precious time, trying to find one. Luckily we had cookies, grapes, and bottled water, to sustain us. By the time we reached the outer belt, there were no visible tracks where earlier vehicles had carved some paths for us to follow. We had no idea if we were even on the road, or had drifted off it and were driving along the berm. The entire area before us was just white and covered in drifts of snow. We could hear the clumping snow, hit the floor pan beneath our feet, as we drove along. Between the ever deepening snow, it felt as though we were trapped in an endless oblivion. Loss of traction meant we could only go about 45 to 50 mph, tops. Any attempt to go faster and the car's back end would begin to fish-tail, at irregular intervals. It was a nightmare trip, that I remember as clearly today (in 2023). I am 70 years old, presently. In 1978, I was only 25.

I missed the snow, I keep missing the snow, just as well I no longer have snow and rain boots, can't even find them. Mean time, my sister didn't miss the storms but brother snow blew the road to the house for her when she came back to work. No it wasn't that bad, she went to work the next day.

I want that THIS year. I deliver on gig apps and I want all the masses too scared to drive so that they have to hire ME. BRING THE SNOW!!!

12:30 UNTRUE. The kids were DELIGHTED. Come on.

I was 18 in Milwaukee Wisconsin at the time, that was just normal at that time and the prior 12 year that I was there. If you went back and asked anyone what the winter weather was like they would tell you it's normal not some freak event that happened. You got allot of snow and the cities were equipped to handle it. Is what it is.

They mastered the art of geo engineering the weather now.

Best years for snowforts EVER. I was 10 when the first storm hit. I grew up in SE Ontario and lived in our snowforts forts whenever possible. Like many kids, my parents kept our spirits and innocence up, and we made an adventure of it.

Analyze the winter of 1995 through 1996 minnesota wisconsin north dakota. What you are talking about here is mild.

The blizzard of 78. I was 14 living in Cranston RI. By 4 pm my parents knew what was happening, not shared with my sister and I. My father was one of the men “I know a guy”. He walked to the local national guard building and got a ride in a military truck to a neighboring town. He returned at 2am riding a snowmobile. I got my first look at it the next morning along with over 3 feet of snow. Drifts were much higher and covered the windows. The power was out, it stayed out for 6 or more days. We all gathered in the living room where the only heat source was, a fireplace. Reheating frozen food took place in there. By the 3rd day the water pressure in the house had dropped, toilets took 20 minutes to refill. Temperatures in parts of the house were in the 40s, we closed doors to rooms and hung blankets over hallway opening to keep what little heat we had in the living room.
As a 14 year of boy this was the greatest event of my life. A combination of a survival, camping and snowmobiling. An adventure that lasted over a week with memories that last a life time.

Speaking as someone who lives in a town where the river freezes every year….NEVER walk on a frozen river!!!! Lakes are safe with proper augers to test for depth, rivers are not!

When we get a couple of inches of snow in the southern areas of the uk it causes panic schools close you get newspapers like the sun calling it the big freeze the trains stop running because its the 20:30 wrong kind of snow cars just can't cope with slippery roads because stupid drivers are too thick not to use there breaks i mean if we had the kind of weather most countries call normal.we would have a breakdown of law and order looting bun fights in the streets mayhem all because our modern ways of life just cant cope with a few inches of ice but that Britain for you never known hardship from weather because in the uk we don't get weather we just get samples

Michigan was involved.

During the worst part of the Blizzard of '77, my grandpa had to sleep on the floor of a gas station for three days straight (with many other people) because he got trapped on his way to work!

Remember it well, nobody tells the whole story. In Northern NJ, where I lived, we got 40+ inches in about a week. Snow had drifted to the windows on the second floor of our house. We dug a tunnel out the front door. That was the only way out, aside from crawling out our bedroom windows on the second floor. It took 2 weeks to get off the hill we lived on

I was in highschool at the time. The Ohio National Guard was moving stuck semi trucks off the road with their tanks. Everyone and anyone who had a snowmobile was out rescuing stranded motorists who were buried in their cars. We had the longest Christmas break that year as the storm hit just when we were to return back to school.