Posted on 01/26/2007 10:43:10 AM PST by Chi-townChief
Twenty fours hours before all chaos would break loose, National Weather Center meteorologists forecast a chance of snow for Thursday, Jan. 26, 1967.
Had they known then what they know now, they might have called for a big chance of snow or a chance of big snow.
As in many recent years, the winter leading up to the Blizzard of 67 had been a mild one, said Mark Ratzer, senior forecaster for the National Weather Services Romeoville office. We were in the 50s on Jan. 21 and 22.
Two days before the snowstorm hit, Chicagos high temperature was 65 degrees and the low was 44, both records that still stand today.
But on the 25th, the day before the storm, a cold front moved through the upper Midwest. The band stretched from southern Canada to the Texas panhandle.
With arctic high pressure building north in Canada and a low pressure system developing in the southern states, a stationary frontal boundary settled over the Chicago region.
On the morning of the 26th, forecasters updated their predictions, calling for 4 inches of snow. Then, by mid-morning, 4 to 8 inches.
Though they issued heavy snow warnings all day, their cumulative estimates fell far short of the actual precipitation. In all, 19.8 inches fell in a 24-hour period. Before it was over, 23 inches were on the ground, crippling the city and giving its residents memories for a lifetime.
To have a storm of 67s magnitude, Ratzer said, certain conditions have to be in place, namely a stationary frontal boundary needs to exist and there must be a large gradient of temperatures along the front.
The 67 storm had all the makings of a newsmaker: warm and moist on the southern front, cold and dry up north.
The extreme temperature fluctuation causes a low pressure system to build and increases the jet stream speed, Ratzer said. The result is a wicked blend of wind and snow.
Often, there are warnings of tumultuous things to come.
Usually rain or even thunderstorms precede such a snowstorm, he said. On the evening of the 24th, there were thunderstorms and reports of wind damage and funnel clouds over citys Southwest Side. The gusting 48-mph winds collapsed a building under construction at 87th Street and Stony Island.
Little did Chicagoans know, that was only the beginning. The high pressure boundary, centered over Lake Superior, kept cold dry air pouring into the Great Lakes. Meanwhile, the Gulf Coast states on the southern end of the front fed warm moisture into the storm.
In between, Chicagoans went about their business.
Then the snow began to fall, and fall.
Howling winds and lake effect precipitation led to drifts. Roads closed, cars were abandoned and life as Chicagoans knew it came to a screeching halt.
Ratzer was only 3 months old at the time, but he remembers his father telling the story of how his flight from Montreal to Chicago that day was canceled, so he had to take a train into Union Station. He ran a few blocks to catch the commuter train at Northwestern Station, but just missed it. Stranded, he spent the night in the station.
The 1967 blizzard still holds the record for greatest snowfall in a 24-hour period and greatest snowfall from a single storm.
Source: A Look Back at the January 67 Big Snow by Jim Allsopp, warning coordination meteorologist for NOAAs National Weather Service Weather Forecast Office. To read more, visit www.crh.noaa.gov/crnews/display.
40th anniversary, or as Algore would call it "the beginning" /sarc
They didn't realize that two-year-old Jim Cantore's parents had just moved to Wheaton a few weeks before.
I wasn't in Chicago then, but in St. Louis, and I wonder if we had a storm at the same time. I remember one of the local weathermen telling a story about how he had made a forecast of "partly cloudy". Within hours, St. Louis was hit by such a bad snowstorm that the weatherman wasn't able to leave the TV station to go home, and had to put up with viewers calling in to tell him about how much "partly cloudy" they were shoveling off their driveways.
Man, I remember the Blizzard of '67! I was 13 years old at the time, and we lived on the north side. I remember shoveling out a parking spot on our street and putting a chair there to save the spot. I remember pushing cars that got stuck in the snow. I remember jumping off the the roof of our garage into the huge snowdrifts below. And I remember how hard it was for days--maybe a couple of weeks--afterward to get to and from high school. The city buses took forever, and sometimes we would put the thumb out and hitch rides.
... in Chicago, anyway.
I also very well remember that storm...we lived on the Northwest Side of Chicago, on Kimball Ave, which was a main thorough fare for buses, semis, and it had an on and off ramp to the Kennedy...after the storm had dumped its final snow, the street looked like a parking lot, with buses, and trucks and cars just abandoned, because they could go no further...we had a garage in which our parents parked our cars, but we were at the very end of a dead end alley, and there was no way my dad could get his car out of the garage and down the alley...we had to do without a car, for what seemed like a long time, until some of that snow got cleared away...
People who did park on the streets, shoveled out their parking spots, and then put chairs and ropes and signs up, declaring that spot as their own, and heaven help anyone who tried to use that spot, other than the person who cleared it out...I remember seeing more than one fist fight break out when someone tried to use parking place on the street, that he had not personally shoveled out....
My dad took tons of pictures of what the city looked like during the storm, and just after it...I remember seeing a shot of my mom, walking to the grocery store, pulling her shopping cart behind...the sidewalks had been shoveled off by that time, but all the snow, was just piled up on either side of the sidewalk...it looked like those mounds of snow, on either side of the sidewalk, were about 8 feet high...it looked like my mom was going down the cleared off sidewalk, surrounded by huge mountains of snow, on either side of her...
My dad worked graveyard at Sunbeam on the south side...on the day of the storm, he decided not to drive, but rather to take the 'L'...and when he came home in the morning, after the storm had done its damage, he came home, bringing along one of his fellow workers, as this fella lived out in the suburbs and could not get home...so he lived with us for a couple of days, until he could get home...I know his wife sure missed him, as they had about 8 children, and she was holed up, surrounded by snow, with 8 kids, and just herself to care for them...
So many stores ran short of bread, and eggs, and milk, and toilet paper, as people panicked, and tried to buy out everything, and anything they could, as people were worried that the trucks making deliveries to the food stores, were not going to be able to get through with their deliveries...
That was some storm...
BTW, notice that the photo says JUL 67. I'm guessing that's when the photo was *developed*, 'cause I sure don't remember the snow lasting that long!
I remember the storm. We lived in Aurora Illinois at the time, and the thing was HUGE. There were cars off the road in ditches, that were completely covered by snow so deep that it looked like they weren't there, except for the antennas sticking up.
The following July, there were STILL big piles of ice/snow that had been plowed aside to clear parking lots from the storm. The one at our grocery store was at least 4 feet high.
The snow did last until the following July, at least in Aurora Illinois, in huge piles of ice/snow that had been plowed to clear parking lots.
LOL! Okay, that picture was taken after the storm, developed in July.
It was a lulu, though.
That might have been it. St. Louis probably would have gotten something from that storm.
Charles, thanks for all those pictures..it sure does bring back some memories of that 'fun' time so long ago...
Today, I live in the Pacific Northwest, in Western Washington State, and we almost never get any snow...tho I will say, we got a few inches of snow, in mid December, and everyone freaked out...myself included, since I have been gone from Chicago since 1978...I am no longer used to driving in blizzards and snow storms...these days, if I want to play in the snow, we just go up to the mountains, and enjoy the snow up there...
Of course, thinking back on that huge snowstorm, I get nostalgic for Chicago...that storm was surely some storm, even by Chicago standards....
I am trying to remember when my dad finally got our neighbors all organized, for everyone to dig out the alley behind our houses...it did no good for my dad to dig out the alley, just by our house, we had to get all the neighbors clear down the block to join in a concerted effort to dig out the whole alley, so that dad could finally get his car out of the garage and down the alley...and then, the alley opened up onto a side street, and we know, in Chicago, the snow plows and salt trucks will hit the side streets only after all the main streets have been dug out...I think we had to get a whole block full of people together to shovel out the alley, and the side street...if we had waited to get the side street cleared out by the city, we would have been waiting until springtime..
It sure is fun, remembering that big snow...
:)
Looks like a normal winter in NYS to me. We have lots of pictures of the various houses I've lived in that look like that.
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