Memories still linger of the Blizzard of ’78

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BOSTON – The snowflakes started to fall innocently enough on Feb. 6, 1978, but the blizzard that ensued battered the Northeast through the night. Hurricane-strength winds carved snowdrifts as high as rooftops. Massive waves clawed the coast, swallowing homes and carving up beaches. Thousands of drivers abandoned their cars on roadways. Power failures darkened neighborhoods. In the dark and cold, babies were born, and people died.

And still the flakes fell.

When the snow began earlier in the day, Deborah Bier thought nothing of it. She was alone in her Watertown apartment, her roommate away and her cat at the vet, but the 19-year-old Brandeis student curled up in bed that night thinking that the snow and howling wind were no different from the storm just days before.

When she awoke the next morning, the building’s furnace had gone out, and fresh snow stretched across her yard and the street beyond. Bier pulled on her boots and jacket, grabbed a shovel, and headed out the front door. It was only after she had dug herself into a trench several feet deep, and still hadn’t hit the ground, that it hit her.

“I realized I just couldn’t get through it,” said Bier, now 44. “I panicked. I couldn’t breathe. I ran into the house and didn’t come out for hours. I was literally overwhelmed with it.”

The 24-hour storm that pounded the Northeast 25 years ago this month was like no other in recent memory. Cars vanished for days under the snow. Thousands of people crowded gymnasiums, churches and shelters for warmth and food. Armed National Guardsmen patrolled the streets. Schools and roads were closed, and stores selling the bare essentials were ordered open.

“This storm is really one of the major meteorological events of the 20th century,” said Louis W. Uccellini, director of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, a department of the National Weather Service in Camp Springs, Md. “It’s not surprising to me that people who lived through it look at it as sort of a seminal event in their lives.”

The storm, which took several days to crawl to shore, was a triumph for modern-day forecasting. It was one of the first major storms to be predicted so accurately – so much so, that even some meteorologists didn’t believe their own forecasts, Uccellini said.

Indeed, some storms the month before had fallen short of spectacular predictions, making the public skeptical about the dire forecasts for the February storm.

“The models would do it, and people would say, ‘I’ve got to see it to believe it,”‘ Uccellini said.

For three days, forecasters described the storm forming off the Atlantic coast. At the same time, a frigid low-pressure system high over Canada made its way across New York.

By the evening of Feb. 5, the two storms had combined and were churning some 300 miles off the coast of Virginia and the Carolinas. Overnight, it began heading slowly for Cape Cod.

Now a howling vortex, the storm exploded on Feb. 6.

In New York, the hurricane-strength winds began whipping over land during the morning rush hour, dumping snow and stranding motorists on roadways throughout the New York metropolitan area.

As it crept up the coast, Connecticut’s coastline got pounded, then it hit Rhode Island. It reached Boston with cyclone force around noon, winds gusting to 92 mph. Then, the storm barely moved for a day, dumping several feet of snow on many areas, paralyzing day-to-day life.

“It went from snow, to very heavy snow, in a very short period of time,” Uccellini said. “People knew about the storm and still went to work because it wasn’t snowing when they got up, and then the snow came crashing in with 20, 30, 40 and 50 mile an hour winds.”

Ric Werme didn’t think twice about going to a Monday morning talk by one of the pioneers of what is now known as the Internet. Werme, then a 27-year-old Digital Equipment Corp. engineer, put out his cat, started up his VW Rabbit, and headed from his Marlboro home to the lecture in nearby Maynard.

Later, he had lunch as the snow began falling. He spent several hours chatting with the speaker, before heading home at about 5:30 p.m.

The wind buffeted the car as he headed out on Interstate 495. The snow struck at a side angle, erasing any sign of the lane stripes on the road. Werme used guardrails and other roadside landmarks to keep his car centered, and crept down the highway. Cars were stalled and stuck on the exit ramps, bottling up cars still on the highway.

“They just bogged down in the snow, and couldn’t get further. That was a problem, because it indicated that even if I could get through the snow, I couldn’t get around them,” said Werme, 52, who now works at Hewlett-Packard in Boscawen, N.H.

He eventually made it to the Marlboro exit, and navigated the mile to his house without great difficulty. When he waded through waist-deep snow to the front door, his cat – walking in snow over her head – gave him a reproachful look as Werme let her in at about 6:15 p.m.

A phone call awoke Massachusetts State Police Trooper John Kelley at 7:30 p.m. Monday. Kelley, then 27, had worked the midnight shift the previous night. He had gone to sleep around 11 a.m. when snow and wind had only just begun to rake the region.

The evening wake-up call ordered Kelley to report early to the Framingham barracks. He threw on his uniform, shoveled his cruiser out of the blinding snow, then headed north, eventually getting onto Route 128 north, a busy highway that circles Boston.

As he reached Needham, the compact car in front of him fishtailed wildly and stopped in its tracks. Kelly got out of his car and, with a trooper from a cruiser behind him, tried to get the car moving. The car didn’t budge, nor did theirs.

Kelly spent the next 36 hours on the highway, trudging up and down the line of cars in the snow, brushing off windshields to be sure that no one was trapped inside. He’d return to the cruiser to warm up, and then head out again to check the sea of cars trapped for miles all around him, sometimes only able to tell there was a trapped automobile by the antennae peeking up through the snow.

“We didn’t see any panic out there at all. There were so many people sharing the same fate, we never saw any arguments, we never saw any fights, we never saw any panic, it was just, ‘We’re going to get through this,”‘ said Kelley, now 52 and a lieutenant colonel.

He wouldn’t know until the next morning that thousands of cars and trucks were trapped on Route 128, including a massive backup on the other side of the highway in Needham, where a jackknifed semi blocked a line of traffic that stretched for miles.

Nor would Kelley know that it would be five days before he returned home.

“We were in the same uniform for five days straight. No one thought it would be a five-day tour of duty. We looked like George Washington’s forces after trying to cross the Potomac,” he said. “We were a pretty tough-looking bunch.”

Lillian Willis woke up early Tuesday morning to a dark house. The electricity was off in her Hull home, and she thought it had been just another storm – until the fire chief called.

The chief wanted to know if Willis, the kitchen manager at a nearby school, had keys to the school’s walk-in refrigerators. If she did, he said, she needed to come over right away and open them, or else the fire department would break the locks to get at the food inside.

Willis walked to the school, barely able to see through the snow and gloom. When she arrived, she found the school packed with hundreds of people displaced from their flooded and freezing homes on the Hull peninsula, which juts out into Boston Harbor.

People were on mats on the gymnasium floor and stretched out in classrooms. Many were soaked from the ocean flooding, and some had brought their pets – including a parrot – and the firefighters were drying their socks over the gas stove.