This story was originally published in 2016, on the blizzard of 1996\u2019s 20th anniversary.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Most everyone likes an occasional snowfall to freshen the world \u2014 a few inches to cover the dead lawn and cling to the bare branches. Painters try to capture the mood evoked by that sight but very few do, because they follow the lead of Thomas Kinkade and blend far too much sentiment into the palette.<\/p>\n
But a blizzard? Who but a commercial plow driver likes a blizzard?<\/p>\n
Dear reader, accompany me back to the first week of January, 1996. It was a simpler time. We had a crude Internet that relied on dial-up telephone lines. \u201cThe Simpsons\u201d was only a season or two past its prime. I mention this because I would end up passing the hours of the storm watching virtually every episode of that once-fine show on a VCR. In this way, I fended off the madness that afflicted the overwintering hotel caretaker of \u201cThe Shining.\u201d<\/p>\n
But that\u2019s getting ahead of things. We ought to begin with the beat of the butterfly\u2019s wings that started the current of air that traveled the world and joined with other waves of energy from a zillion other atmospheric disturbances and finally coalesced into the nor\u2019easter that started dropping snow on Washington, D.C., on Saturday, Jan. 6.<\/p>\n
That same day, The Morning Call carried a story with this comforting quote from a meteorologist: \u201cIt will not be a significant event in the Allentown area. The farther south you go, the more snow there will be, but even for Philadelphia it doesn\u2019t look like it will be a terribly heavy snowfall.\u201d<\/p>\n
O Fortuna! The Lehigh Valley\u2019s destiny, we now know, was written in the stars, which the forecasters could not see because of the clouds.<\/p>\n
In truth, the storm\u2019s track shifted, which is characteristic of nor\u2019easters. When a shift steers a storm away, everyone laughs at the weather service. When it doesn\u2019t, everyone gets mad at the weather service. Working for the weather service is a no-win job sometimes.<\/p>\n
If you are old enough to remember (and I am distressed to report that many of my colleagues are not) then you\u2019ll remember how the storm exploded \u2014 raged, rampaged, spat nails, cracked its cheeks \u2014 beyond anyone\u2019s estimation, gathering force Saturday, howling through Sunday, fading away Monday and Tuesday.<\/p>\n
It was one of the most powerful snowstorms ever to hit the region \u2014 one of just two ranked as \u201cextreme\u201d on the Northeast Snowfall Index Scale, the wintry version of the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale.<\/p>\n
The other extreme storm had hit just three years earlier \u2014 the monstrous March 1993 \u201cStorm of the Century\u201d that dropped snow from Alabama to Maine and killed 208 people.<\/p>\n
I was still in North Carolina for that one, but in 1996 I lived on New Street in Bethlehem with one of my colleagues from my old paper. I could see my car, parked on a side street, disappearing inch by inch. The power stayed on, thank goodness. We had electric heat.<\/p>\n
But chaos unfolded all around us. Road, rail and air traffic halted across eight states. For a time, it was illegal for anyone but plow drivers, emergency workers and members of the media to drive on the highways of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and elsewhere.<\/p>\n
I can vouch from experience that some members of the media didn\u2019t do so because some members of the media had snow shovels the size of a tablespoon and couldn\u2019t free their cars for two days.<\/p>\n
We trudged through the snow to Nick\u2019s Pizza Restaurant for meals, because we hadn\u2019t stocked up on milk, bread and eggs. Let that be a lesson.<\/p>\n
The storm dumped at least 17 inches of snow on every East Coast city from Maine to Washington. Allentown recorded 25.6 inches \u2014 a record \u2014 but less than the 30.7 that buried Philadelphia and smashed that city\u2019s record by about 9 inches.<\/p>\n
Other regions got unimaginable amounts: up to 48 inches in parts of West Virginia and Virginia.<\/p>\n
Six people died in the Valley. Some succumbed to heart attacks and car accidents. One elderly Allentown woman somehow ended up outside in her nightclothes and froze. In the vast storm zone, 60 people died.<\/p>\n
We all pushed our way back to normal life eventually, but it was a haunting time. It snowed again Jan. 12 and then warmed abruptly and everything melted, and before you knew it the statue of Christopher Columbus in Easton\u2019s Riverside Park was up to its eyeballs in the waters of the Delaware.<\/p>\n
Even nostalgia, which can alchemize almost anything into a pleasant memory, can\u2019t make me miss those few days.<\/p>\n
Morning Call reporter Daniel Patrick Sheehan can be reached at 610-820-6598 or dsheehan@mcall.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This story was originally published in 2016, on the blizzard of 1996\u2019s 20th anniversary.\u00a0 Most everyone likes an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":80156,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[119,121,120,433,182,139,434,28,432,1133],"class_list":{"0":"post-80155","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-allentown","8":"tag-allentown","9":"tag-allentown-headlines","10":"tag-allentown-news","11":"tag-lehigh-county","12":"tag-local-news","13":"tag-news","14":"tag-northampton-county","15":"tag-pennsylvania","16":"tag-top-stories-tmc","17":"tag-weather"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80155\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/80156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}