A ton of snow, a ton of caring recalled on 40th anniversary of monstrous storm
ABOVE: Walls of snow line State Route 235 near the Champaign County line after being plowed by the Ohio Department of Transportation. (PHOTO | OHIO DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION)
HOME PAGE SLIDE SHOW PHOTO: A lone automobile makes its way through downtown Bellefontaine in the aftermath of the Blizzard of 1978. (PHOTO | NICK JOHNSON, COURTESY OF RON IRICK)
Forty years ago today — Jan. 26, 1978 — the winds were howling and blowing snowflakes the size of feathers into mountainous drifts that would leave the state’s transportation network crippled for days to come.
Only the bravest souls ventured out — first in four-wheel drive vehicles and later only in snowmobiles — attempting to rescue individuals left without power by toppled trees and utility poles or dealing with other life-threatening emergencies.
The Blizzard of ’78 lives on in infamy to those who survived it and continues to be the measuring stick against which all other winter storms are compared.
“The biggest snow I remember we had before that was 1950,” Wayne Wickerham, who has been a National Weather Service weather observer for the past 55 years, said. “The biggest one on record was 1918, which is 100 years ago this year and the same year of the big flu outbreak. My dad used to like to talk about that and some of the other old timers that were around when I was growing up.”
But 1978 takes the cake, the Huntsville area weather historian said.
The rare meteorological phenomenon began on Wednesday, Jan. 25, as two systems merged over the central United States, producing a massive and powerful storm system with the lowest barometric pressure ever recorded on the U.S. mainland in a non-hurricane event.
The barometer fell throughout the day Wednesday as many local residents remember driving home from both first and second shift jobs in balmy, heavy wet rains but no indication of what was set to follow.
A barometer reading taken at the Greater Cincinnati Airport shows a low of 28.525 inches recorded almost exactly at midnight. The record low of 28.28 inches would be recorded a few hours later at the Cleveland airport, the National Weather Service reports.
“That was the lowest that had ever been recorded,” Wickerham said. “The barometric pressure just sucked all that into one area and made a huge mess.”
VANGUARD
It was around that time the rain became snow of incredible size, according to former Bellefontaine resident Kevin Weimer.
“Those were the biggest snowflakes I’ve ever seen — like feathers falling through the air,” he said. “Then you couldn’t see anything and the winds started up.”
Drifting made businesses in the 100 block of north Main Street inaccessible. (PHOTO | NICK JOHNSON, COURTESY OF RON IRICK)
About 4 a.m. Thursday, Jan. 26, Weimer called a sergeant he knew with the Ohio National Guard and within a few hours, volunteers began assembling at the Bellefontaine Armory for a local operation that went by the name VANGUARD.
A similar team of local volunteers called REACT had formed around Indian Lake, according to Examiner reporting at the time, while individuals like Wickerham, who had a large tractor capable of traversing the snow, were aiding the local fire departments in communities like Huntsville to aid nearby residents.
Many of the volunteers brought with them four-wheel drive vehicles and their own snowmobiles to aid in the efforts, Weimer said.
Throughout the day, the VANGUARD team responded to numerous rescue operations in and around Bellefontaine.
“Another guy and I were working together,” Weimer said. “He had a four-wheel drive, but it got to the point we couldn’t drive it because the snow was blowing and packing up into the tie rods. Iy got where you couldn’t turn the steering wheel so we took the four-wheel drive out.”
Read complete story in Friday’s Examiner.
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