IMPACT:1962 Storm’s record snowfall bombarded Bangor

The Interstate was down to one barely passable lane, and hundreds of travelers abandoned their cars to huddle together in booths at the old Pilots Grill, waiting out the storm of the century.

On Dec. 30, 1962, Bangor was hit with 25.5 inches of snow in a single day, the highest daily tally in the history of climate records in Maine.

The forecast had been for “occasional snow or flurries,” leaving residents utterly unprepared for the onslaught. Then the thermometer dropped 16 degrees in a single hour, and the flakes began to fall.

A pregnant woman went into labor during the storm, tied on her boots and walked several blocks to the hospital before giving birth. Another mother and her six children were rescued from their Dixmont home by a soldier on a snowmobile.

Plows traveled from more than a hundred miles away to help clear away the 20-foot drifts of new snow.

“I’ve seen nothing like that one. Never,” now-retired milkman Tom Spellman told a reporter on the 40th anniversary of the day he waded through waist-deep snow to make his rounds.

Snowstorms are a fact of life in Maine, regardless of small climate shifts, but in this case, there may be something to parents’ arguments that their childhood was far colder, snowier and more onerous than that of their offspring.

More snow fell in 1962 than in any year before or since. The years from 1951 to 1972, clearly a cold, stormy phase in Maine’s history, were tied to a shift in the atmospheric system that is responsible for much of Maine’s weather, a pattern known as the North Atlantic Oscillation, state climatologist Greg Zielinski said.

Recent years have had mild weather because of the behavior of the North Atlantic Oscillation, but scientists predict the pattern could switch back to stormy cold weather in the near future.

Just a few years ago, central Maine spent the start of the new year at the mercy of nature.

On Jan. 6, 1998, freezing rain fell on Maine for three days. Then-Gov. Angus King declared a state of emergency and called in the National Guard. Now, eight years later, it’s known simply as the ice storm.

More than 300,000 people were trapped in their homes without heat or electricity, or were living as refugees at friends’ houses or local motels. Mainers spoke of ice-covered “pine limbs going off like shotguns” as they snapped and crashed into cars and homes.

The ice storm was dramatic, but, according to Zielinski, it likely was unrelated to global warming or any other type of climate change. Although some climate models predict more ice and less snow in Maine if warming trends continue, the weather patterns that brought about the ice storm could occur again without such warming, he said.

“Things weren’t moving, cold air was trapped in a vacuum – it was the classic textbook example of how freezing rain is produced,” he said.

The recent warming trend in global average temperatures has affected Maine’s climate. Temperature averages in coastal Maine are increasing, Zielinski said, while average temperatures in northern Maine may be cooling. Statewide in the 1990s, Maine experienced several of its hottest years.

But temperature records alone, like individual storms, don’t represent climate change accurately. The record-high temperature in Maine’s history occurred long before climate change was a common phrase – 105 degrees in North Bridgton on July 4, 1911.