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National Geographic : 1977 Dec
Contents
they talked about the weather.... "The Old Farmer's Almanac-it predicted this rotten winter..... And how about that January night when the mercury plunged to minus 36, turn ing the diesel fuel to jelly? Even the snow plows were stopped in the drifts. That was the night Harry Burd's ears froze." Three weeks later I could still see the scabs of frostbite. Factories Close, Out of Gas I pushed into the Midwest, across the tundra of the Ohio Valley to Dayton. There the thermometer told the tragic story of this winter-wracked metropolis and much of the eastern United States. The average daily tem perature in Dayton ran 17 degrees colder than normal. Furnaces burned full time to keep the chill away. It was the same across the frozen East, placing an unprecedented strain on a limited supply of natural gas. Countless businesses closed down. An epidemic of unemployment spread, hitting hard at Dayton. In the sub-zero dawn I hailed a taxi and toured nearly deserted streets that should have been clogged with commuters. But I found business booming at the unemployment office. Its cavernous second-floor hall was filled with people signing up for compensa tion. A steelworker told me his plant had closed eight weeks earlier. In the downstairs lobby, a polite young zealot handed me a limp tabloid denouncing capitalism and extolling socialism. He castigated the Dayton Power and Light Company for running out of nat ural gas. Almost everyone seemed to think DP&L was to blame. Not so, responded the belea guered company. It had taken good care of its customers before this freakish winter struck. Further, DP&L had no storage capacity; it drew directly from a transmission company that bought from gas fields in Texas, Louisi ana, and the Gulf of Mexico. There lay the trouble. The wells were slowly running out, and low rates imposed by the government dis couraged exploration for new gas. And so it went, across much of the shivering country. In the middle of February the dreadful cold spell suddenly snapped, and spring came early and gloriously to the East. Looking back on the ordeal, was it really the "worst winter" it seemed to be? If you live in the Ohio River Valley, the answer is an unequivocal "yes." Cincinnati set an all-time record with a brittle minus 25°F. Dayton's 21° below came next, rivaled by minus 19° in Columbus. Pittsburgh re corded a new low of minus 17°; Evansville, Indiana, minus 21°. From Philadelphia to Peoria, January was the coldest month ever. (In much of Alaska it was the warmest.) Across the South, cities recorded temperatures that bordered on the absurd: minus 1° in Huntsville, Alabama; 10° in Pensacola, Florida; 6° in Jackson, Mississippi. Snow, too, set records. On January 31 it rested on part of every state of the contigu ous 48 for the first time on record (following pages). Never had snow fallen as far south as Miami; never in ten years of satellite obser vation had it covered so much of the North ern Hemisphere. By winter's end, 200 inches - nearly 17 feet-had fallen on Buffalo. The damage in dollars and cents is difficult to measure. Florida officials feared a potential loss of 900 million dollars in citrus, vegetables, and tourism. Joblessness may have siphoned off another 225 million in Ohio, with New York, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania not far behind. Commerce Department analysts esti mate the winter cost the nation a hefty three billion dollars in economic growth, and de voured five billion more in increased fuel. Rich Topsoil Blows Away While Easterners shoveled heavy drifts, the National Weather Service announced a seemingly incongruous fact: Much of the nation was caught up in severe drought. Worst off by far were the northern plains and the West. Already two years of dry weather had plagued the eastern Dakotas and western Minnesota and Iowa. California had endured a year of drought. Suddenly most of the West was stricken. A major culprit was that high-pressure ridge hovering over the Pacific coast-the same system that was bringing disaster to the East. With moist Pacific storms diverted northward, little snow was falling on the Sierra, Cascades, and Rockies, or on the plains beyond. This meant woefully little spring melt to recharge the rivers and reser voirs of the West (pages 816-17). 809
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