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The Storm of the Century?

© Christina Coruth

The quality of the photos below is not very good, but I hope you get the picture I am trying to convey!

March 5, 2001 was to have been a date to go down into the record books. It was to have been the starting date of the "Blizzard of the Century." Some compared its projected impact to the Perfect Storm of October '91, while others claimed it would rival the Blizzard of '78. Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York expected to get slammed with wind driven snow that would be measured in feet, not inches. Major Network anchors, as well as newscasters for cable stations such as CNN, reported on the mammoth storm bearing down on the Northeast. The spotlight was on the Weather Channel. It was a meteorological feeding frenzy.

As the storm blew into the doomed states, it soon became apparent that they would not be hit by the "Blizzard of the Century." Indeed, the few flakes that fell in New York City melted on contact. Suddenly, the "Blizzard of the Century" was being dubbed the "Fizzle of the Century" and meteorologists found themselves buried under an avalanche of weather jokes. Anchors saved face with stories about the "storm that wasn't" laying the blame on the uncertainty of weather forecasting. There was no escaping the prevailing attitudes of folks like William Saffire, who wrote in his March 8th column in the New York Time, "The TV weatherpeople flew into a blizzy."

"Hel - lo" news anchors and journalists! I'm here to tell you that the northeastern USA does not end with New York. New England did not secede from the Union, nor did it drop off the continent into the Atlantic. We are still here and we got slammed!

In New Hampshire, some areas received more than two feet of snow and, at times, experienced blizzard conditions. Other parts of New England, particularly Vermont, got hit even harder. Power outages, school cancellations, parking bans, and airport flight delays and cancellations occurred throughout New England. The coast took a battering as normally high tides were higher still due to the storm. Coastal roads were flooded in spots and strewn with bowling ball sized rocks tossed up by the waves.

There was no January thaw this year to melt the snow accumulation of the season. With each storm, large and small, the depth of snow grew. Another 18" to 24" didn't help. This made plowing a nightmare. Snow had to be hauled away as the height of the snow banks increased to the point that they caused hazardous conditions at intersections. Avalanche warnings were issued for Huntington and Tuckerman's Ravine. A new announcement became a routine part of the local nightly news - the location of the latest roof that collapsed under the weight of all the snow. That's right, not only were we shoveling walkways and driveways, we were shoveling roofs as well.

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