I'm watching the weather and I see that from Kansas to Virginia they are under a winter storm. I feel sorry for those folks. We in the Deep South understand storm disaster, but at least in a hurricane we don't worry about freezing to death.
I recall my time at Fort Knox, the only time I really had to worry about thigs like blizzards. The storm that hit in late January 1978 was a doozy. I was a young Company Commander running a training company. I had roughly 300 troops and a dozen cadre. We lost heat and the water was freezing in the toilets. I was never so miserable, trying to keep the troops warm and fed.
AsI thik back, the blizzard that hit in Feb 79 was a problem too.
For all my friends in the Frozen North, I'm thinking about you. Keep a fire lit, and stay warm. This too will pass, but you have to keep breathing until Spring.
2 comments:
I was a teenager in North Central Indiana in '78. We got something like 2 feet of snow, but in the open farmland there (in the winter with no crops to break it up) wind would blow drifts up against anything not moving.
When dad opened the garage door on Sunday morning after the storm had died down, we had to beat on it to break it loose, but once he got it to open, the snow was drifted up all the way to the top. We basically had to tunnel our way out to get the car out to go to church.
During the storm, the snowplows were running along the main roads. We lived right on state road 19. It was only two lanes but it was one of the main roads in the county and got plowed continuously. As the plows started piling snow up on either side of the road, they made drifts, which then caused more snow to drift up on it, then they'd plow again making the drifts bigger, more wind drifts, lather, rinse, repeat. That Sunday morning, between the plows piling it up and the wind drifting the snow, driving down 19 was like driving through a tunnel, the snow was drifted up to something like 6 or 7 feet high. They'd only plowed out one lane, with cutouts ever so often to allow people to pass each other. A couple of times while on the way to church that morning, snowmobiles went over our heads jumping over the road.
During the storm, the snow had drifted over the top of the barnyard fence. A couple of days later it got warm enough to turn the top of it to slush...then it got cold again and froze it solid. I remember going out there with hammers and hatchets to break up the ice all the way around the inside of the fence so the animals couldn't just walk over the fence and out.
That was a storm of a lifetime. Never seen anything like it before or since.
16° this morning here in western ny
https://days.to/spring/2025
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