The weather phenomenon of January 26, 1978, has been called “The Storm of the Century.” It’s also known as the ‘White Hurricane’, the ‘Blizzard of ‘78’, and simply ‘The Storm’. For those who lived through it (look around for folks with a little grey hair) it became a very personal storm that touched their lives for three long days with piercing cold, gale force winds, and a blanket of snow that stacked up against structures, thirty feet deep in spots. In an age when storms weren’t named, it achieved the titles above through merit. Simply put…it earned them. But, what would happen if the same type of phenomenon happened today?
To answer that question we need to take the time to understand the storm. In essence, we need to give the storm a personality all its own, we need to see the storm as the antagonist in the story of January 26, 1978.
Picture this…
The weather forecast on January 25 (Wednesday) for Northeastern Ohio read “rain tonight, possibly mixed with snow at times, windy and cold Thursday with snow flurries.” It wasn’t until late in the day that those forecasters saw the convergence of two low pressure systems over Ohio and upgraded the forecast to storm warnings. By this point, many residents of Northeastern Ohio would have gone to bed, unaware of the impending weather hammer about to pummel the state.
At 3:47 in the morning, the storm announced its true arrival when the barometric pressure at the Akron-Canton Airport dipped to 28.33 inches, the lowest pressure ever recorded in Akron. The temperature, which had been hovering just over the freezing mark, suddenly took a plunge of 21 degrees in an hour as the winds began to blow the twelve inches of previous snow into a torrent of drifts. These winds, which were clocked as high as eighty miles an hour, swirled the previous snow with the current snow into a white out that encompassed all of Ohio at a time when daytime workers were headed to the many plants and factories, kids were heading to school, and office workers traveled to do the business of America.
Very shortly, traffic was snarled as drifts made the roads impassable, and suddenly all those who had braved the storm were truly in peril as the temperature now dropped to near zero. Thousands of Ohioans found themselves stranded in their vehicles as the day wore on; found themselves fighting against the deadly storm as they stayed put, or tried to walk to safety in the sub-zero wind chill factors.
Then the citizens of Northeastern Ohio did something very noble. Responding to the pleas of nearly every police department in the region, thousands of four wheel drive vehicles and snowmobiles began spilling out onto the roadways and taking those stranded or walking to safety. Literally thousands of strangers risking their own lives for the sake of people they certainly didn’t know. At a time when the entire Ohio Turnpike closed for the first time ever, you would have seen these incredibly brave heroes bringing from the teeth of the storm potential victims.
The storm claimed the lives of fifty-one souls in Ohio. Had it not been for these unbelievably heroic citizens, the toll would easily have reached into the hundreds.
What if a storm of this intensity hit Ohio today? This is a very interesting question as we look backwards thirty-five years to the Blizzard of ’78; would the advent of the cellphone and social media in conjunction with more precise weather forecasting be enough to offset the storm known as The White Hurricane?