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Will kids today remember the winter of 2015 like their parents remember 1978?
By adamg on Sat, 01/27/2018 - 11:03am
The Winter that Never Ended kicked into high gear three years ago today:
[On This Day] 3 years ago today was the first of four major storms (>12") to hit New England during the 2015 Snow Blitz. pic.twitter.com/x1uZr2Jpwd
— NWS Boston (@NWSBoston) January 27, 2018
HERE WE GO - the storm begins to hit (More coverage of the first blizzard).
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Comments
Not sure if the kids will
Not sure if the kids will remember, but I, sure as shootin', will.
One thing to remember is that technology was on our side in 2015, unlike 1978:
- we had cellphones in '15, not so much in '78. There was a story of a guy, I think his name was Harry Nunes, who wasn't able to get home for 2 weeks and had no way to contact his family. Kind of like Odysseus getting home from the Trojan War. The family was getting ready to declare him dead. Bet his wife was bummed out when he walked through the door
- telecommuting - with the exception of medical personnel, and tradespeople, many people could work through the storms in '15
I always think that when we go through these things, it is so exciting to see the first robin and crocus of spring. It means we survived to die another day. We are a tough bunch!
For some reason the blizzard
For some reason the blizzard of '78 was different. I can tell you where I was and what I did from the day of the storm to a week after the storm.
The winter of 2015 I remember it was bad, but I can't remember any particular storm or anything I did.
I was born in 1981 so do not
I was born in 1981 so do not recall the winter of 78 or that storm... 2015 was the first year I ever actually said to myself if I had the chance to move more south that I would. Part of the winter of 2015 was that it was not any one storm, it was that the storms just kept hitting one after another. So it wasn't like we could just hunker down for a week and come out the other side.
For me the winter of 1996 was the defining winter of my childhood.
1996?
Was that the April Fool's storm?
Anyway, from Feb 11, 2015, we reached the point where 'throwing it up in the air' seemed like the only option left:
No, that was 1997.
No, that was 1997.
1996
That was when we beat the previous record from 1994. It was a very long winter with snow and ice starting in November and never letting up.
In 1994 the Globe held Robert Parrish in hostage in a snow bank graphic and didn't let him out until we passed the record for snow, which equaled his height.
1978 is outdone
My husband and his family have finally shut up about it.
Note that it was a big storm, but not as big as some that we have had this century - like in 2005 and 2013. The real problem was that forecasting was less certain and people couldn't plan ahead. That, and the coastal flooding, which has now been topped.
I dunno
The part of me that was 7 when the Blizzard of 78 hit remembers leaving school Monday afternoon and returning 3 weeks later. If that factoid is wrong, it was 2 weeks. I also remember that they had to recruit college kids to clear snow, and that it was a decent amount of time before plows cleared our streets (I grew up on a corner.)
The part of me that was 44 when the latest saga occurred is amazed at how little school was missed and how it wasn’t the tale of one two foot snowstorm, but rather the weekly major storms with very cold temperatures.
Can't plow with cars still stuck in the streets
From what my husband says, that was a major problem. That, and the plows were not ready and the plow drivers couldn't get to the city yards to get them out.
It came in very fast, at a very bad time, and was severely underpredicted.
The storm in 2003 had higher snow totals, but the danger was known well in advance and the state was closed when they hit. NY and CT had a lot of people trapped on roads in 2013 because they didn't close things down.
Prediction, preparation = big difference.
Here's a list of storms as of 3 years ago today - note that they called it THE blizzard of 2015. OMG we had noooooo idea! http://www.wbur.org/news/2015/01/26/boston-biggest-snowstorms
For my sons, born in '96 and '98, they "lived a childhood in snow, and all their teens in tow, stuffed in a strata of clothes". One of the few birthdays where it did not snow for my son born on February 10, was the day he was born in the then snowiest winter in history. It has snowed on his birthday 4 out of 5 years in a 20 year period. They have been raised in an era that has seen several the snowiest winters - six of them since 1992. Perhaps 1978 was just the Intro to Changing Climate course?
One counterpoint on the “snowiest winters”
I read back in 2015 that at some point the National Weather Service changed the method snowfall was measured. I cannot remember the change exactly, but the area where the snowfall is cleared after measurement, so it’s cleared either every hour or every 3 hours. In the past, snow got compacted, is there is a good chance winters in the 1950s were in fact snowier.
Look at the margins of difference
Rank order != magnitude.
1950s?
They don't even make the cut here. 1940s are there, so they weren't as snowy as old guy folklore would have you believe.
86.6" for Boston in 2004-05?
Seems very appropriate.
The big problem in 1978...
...I was working out on 128 in Needham, near the towers. I left work to get fuel at noon, the storm was supposed to hit, I believe, late afternoon. There was just a dusting on the ground, but it was that packed white snow that is slick as hell. When I went back to work, I told our nice English lady that ran the show, "It's slippery out there."
Well, she agreed, and everyone got cut early. I passed over 128, saw solid lights, red and white, in both directions. So, side streets it was.
With an inch or two of snow on the ground, everything was so slick that no cars could navigate the off ramps. So, there they sat on the highway until they ran out of gas or were otherwise abandoned.
People near the highways opened their doors up to the storm refugees.
What a lot of folks forget is that in late January we had a pretty good storm that made the snow removal even more fun.
2014-15
That was a wild winter. We had so little snow that winter by mid January and then it hit us big time. And it think it rarely went above freezing in February so the snow was piled up. I did enjoy the snow day off from work the day after the Pats won the Super Bowl!!
I probably count as a "kid"
I probably count as a "kid" to those who can remember '78, since I was born in 1985. And I think the real difference is that you can only complain so much these days without your exhausted audience finally asking, "so why not just MOVE????!??"
My renters opted for a transfer to San Diego after that winter. For many, the barriers to relocating are lower than ever before. At least you can still skype the grandfam, and the most stable employers (so, the ones that allow you to afford housing in Boston to begin with) usually have several locations.
I still joke about the snowpocalypse to see the aghast expressions on my SoCal relatives' faces, but it doesn't make me some kind of martyr. I like it here, and the next few winters were fairly mild. If 2015 is the worst I have to contend with for the next 35-40 years I will be shocked, and feel VERY fortunate. I can handle one or two a decade, even, and I pretty much expect to from now on.
So Cal
Massive snow dumps are not nearly as destructive as months of wildfires.
Wasn't here in '78
...because I was going to college in -- of all places -- Buffalo, which actually got off pretty easy in the Blizzard compared to Boston and New York City, etc. (now, if ya wanna hear about the Blizzard of '77, pull up a chair, sonny).
But the thing about '15 was, rather than one overwhelming weather event that overshadowed most if not all of the other such events that winter, there was for about five weeks a seemingly endless procession of major storms, and an equally endless campaign of snow removal to mitigate their effect on our property. It practically became a regular job: Get up, drink your coffee, eat something, utter a sigh of intense spiritual despair, then go out and keep hacking away at the mounds in the driveway, sidewalk, back patio, etc. You'd make some progress, and then it would be time for another delivery of 8-12 inches. We had to shovel snow out of front yard to our back just to make room for the snow we would have to clear from the sidewalk and driveway.
Sometime in March, our city's DPW sent plows out to clear out the huge berms that had formed on the curbs along our street. I kid you not that I was actually ecstatic at the sight; you could've told me that world peace had been declared and I probably would've just said "Oh, that's nice, too."