FOTS Daily Post
Winter Wonderland
(The Blizzard of '13 Edition)
By this time tomorrow, this is what my yard will look like (but with real snow instead of fake wet paper snow!)... We are battening down the hatches for Winter Storm Nemo, otherwise known as the Blizzard of '13. Interesting that it is happening 35 years to the week of the Blizzard of '78, which in the Boston area was one of the most crippling and debilitating snowstorms in history.
I was a kid, but I remember it well. I remember the snow coming up right to the porch level (about 28 inches). I remember the snow being deep enough to dig snow tunnels, and not just right by the driveway where the snow was piled higher, but throughout the whole yard. I remember climbing a snowbank left from plowing that was piled up against a wooden light pole. After climbing to the top of it, reaching up with my hand, my fingers were only about a foot from the light bulb. We were out of school for a week.
The biggest challenge was not the amount of snow, but the fierce winds. If you look at the photo above, those people are standing on a snowdrift (blown there, not put there by snowplows) that is the height of the building's ROOF.
My father told me today that no one could get out of our town for three days. My dad owned our town's drug store and was able to walk to work. His store was open for whomever had the ability to walk to it. We did not lose power. Because many people were housebound due to the snowdrifts (there were some houses in town where the snowdrifts had trapped them in their homes and had to climb out via second floor windows), he had to get special permission from the police to deliver prescriptions via snowmobile. One main road out of town was covered in 15 foot snowdrifts. We had to wait for the National Guard to come with the Army truck plows to get those roads passable.
This is the kind of storm that this snowstorm has the potential of being. It might also be just snow. I'll let you know! If it gets a bit wild, maybe I'll post a few pics!