Wednesday, January 28, 2004

Here are some reasons, from the winter of 78-79, why I live in Florida.  The image on the left is the reason we had to get on the roof and shovel all the snow off as fast as we could.  The neighbor down the street had his roof collapse under the weight of all the ice and snow.  The image on the right is the path to the house that we had to dig after we dumped all the snow from the roof.  We used the garbage can to shuttle all the snow down the driveway to the street. 11:59:26 PM

Here are a few more interesting items from that winter.  I was living in an appartment in Evanston and remember my car being frozen and immobile for at least a month.  I think that must have been during this time: "The poor weather continued for months. During January, the temperature went above freezing on only three days and then only for a few hours. On the 14th and 15th, a record-setting temperature of -19 degrees F occurred. February was bitter cold and had no temperatures above freezing until the 20th. Thawing weather didn't arrive until March 18th!" Check out the photo of the elevated train coming into the Davis St station.  That was a few stops north of the South Blvd station where I lived.  I didn't actually live in the station but the tracks ran right behind my apartment building.  I remember the plywood snowplows they built onto the front of the trains.  After a few days they started splintering and falling apart.  It just added to the look of destruction that was all around the city that winter. Any Chicagoans should check out this site as it has some really neat old photos of the elevated system in Chicago. 2:28:27 PM

Sounds like a snowy day in the midwest and horth east.  Someone mentioned 27" snowfall forcasts for northern Michigan.  That made me go look for some data on the last winter I spent in Chicago.  This NOAA site has the official Chicago weather extremes where I found this tidbit of info: Snowfall (in inches) Seasonal Greatest 89.7 in 1978-79 The Chicago Public Library has a page that lists more info, including: The Blizzard of 1979 started on Friday night January 12 and lasted until 2 a.m. Sunday January 14. On top of a 7-10 inch base left over from a New Year's Eve blizzard, 20.3 inches of new snow fell--setting a record for total snow on the ground. I remember the New Year's Eve blizzard as the one where I tried to open my car door with the house key, and the combined forces of all the blizzards that year led to need to climb up on the roof to shovel the accumulated snow in an attempt to prevent the roof from caving in under the weight of all the ice and snow.  I'll have to try and find some photos I took back then and post them. Needless to say I determined that I would never go through that experience again and moved to Florida the next fall. 2:07:41 PM

© Copyright 2006 Rod Kratochwill.