Anyone living in Ohio during the winter of 1977-78 has stories to tell about the great blizzard.
Yet the weather 41 years ago today, Jan. 25, 1978, hardly suggested a winter storm of historic proportions was brewing a thousand miles away in the Gulf of Mexico.
The temperature rose to 41 degrees in Columbus, and less than an inch (0.65) of rain fell. At midnight, the mercury still stood near 40 degrees, with light rain and little wind.
Meanwhile, the comparatively primitive computer models pointed to a developing winter storm in the northern Gulf of Mexico that was expected to turn north. The storm intensified on the night of Jan. 25, over eastern Tennessee and Kentucky, as two pieces of upper-level energy merged.
Still, the prospect of a such a dramatic change in the weather in Ohio was beyond comprehension.
The winter cyclone deepened explosively between midnight and 4 a.m. on Jan. 26, while tracking from Portsmouth and Cleveland with the barometric pressure tumbling to an all-time record-low Category 3 hurricane level of 28.47 inches at Columbus.
The wind peaked at 69 mph at Columbus and 82 mph at Cleveland. A stranded ore carrier in Lake Erie recorded sustained winds of 86 mph, and a gust of 111 mph (National Weather Service, Wilmington, Ohio). The lowest barometric pressure in the state tumbled to 28.28 inches at Cleveland.
After the rain turned to windswept snow, temperatures plummeted into the single digits. The Buckeye State was caught in the icy throes of a full-fledged Arctic blizzard before dawn. Travel nearly come to a standstill.
The snowfall varied from 6 to 12 inches by midday over all but the southeastern counties of Ohio, with heavier amounts in the northwest; that was on top of a considerable amount of snow — 28 inches had fallen earlier in the month in a series of three storms in Columbus, already a new record for any month in city weather history.
Ohio Gov. James A. Rhodes declared a state of emergency, urging residents to stay home, and mountainous drifts 10- to 25-foot high snow buried cars and the small buildings. Even worse, nearly 6,000 people were stranded on Ohio roads.
The combination of extreme cold and windblown snow caused the deaths of 51 Ohioans, and nearly half of the victims died while stranded in vehicles.
An estimated 175,000 residents lost electricity for several days, and most schools and businesses would were shuttered for a week or more.
More than 5,000 national guardsmen were ordered into action by Rhodes to help clear 31,000 miles of roadway and attend to trapped victims in their cars and homes for more than week.
The Ohio Army National Guard placed rescued Ohioans at more than 10,000 by truck, and another 2,700 were picked up by Ohio Air National Guard helicopter flights.
A total of 800 vehicles and 45 helicopters were made available for rescues and assistance.
The bitterly cold weather in the wake of the Great Blizzard of ’78 compounded unprecedented hardships created by Ohio’s Storm of the Century.
Total storm damage was placed at nearly $210 million statewide in a storm that Gov. Rhodes called the “greatest disaster in Ohio history.”
Photos courtesy of Ohio History Connection.