Weather History Part 2

Yesterday I mentioned the Storm of the Century dumped 12.91 square miles of snow, but let’s talk about some specific numbers for locations to put it more into perspective. You may wonder much snow actually came from this storm in a specific location. While Salisbury, Md. only saw 2” of snow, not too far away, Washington, D.C. saw 13” of snow! If you think that is a lot of snow, imagine 30” more than that and you would have been in Syracuse! That’s right, Syracuse, NY had a totals of 43” of snow during this storm. Even more amazing, but way to the south, in Birmingham, Ala., they saw 17” of snow. Even Mobile, Ala., where they get their share of hurricanes and tropical storms, saw 3”.

If the snow wasn’t enough, this storm has record breaking low pressure in several locations, frigid temperatures and record wind gusts. In fact, Mount Washington, NH saw gusts of 144 mph and Franklin County, Fla. had gusts up to 110 mph. With winds like this, imagine the winds chills, especially with the temperatures seen in some locations. Not factoring in the winds, Burlington, Vt. Was -12 degrees F and even Birmingham, Ala. was 30 degrees below freezing with a reading of 2 degrees F.

Imagine being at the airport trying to make it to a vacation or business trip. Twenty-five percent of all flight were canceled for two full days! The overall damage ended up costing $6-$10 billion. Sadly, there were 300 fatalities also associated with this storm, a lot due to coastal flooding and tornadoes, however some of the deaths were from heart attacks caused by people overworking their bodies to shovel snow.