Blizzards of the Century: Six insane North American snowstorms

Sunday, November 23, 2014, 9:00 PM -

When a North American city gets pummelled so hard by snow you have the measure the totals in feet, as Buffalo was, your thoughts can't help but turn to whether it was the worst snowstorm ever.

There are countless storms on this continent that epitomized winter's fury, but by what measure would we choose the worst? Monthly records? Single-event? Single-day?

Rather than make this a scientific ranking, we picked a few North American examples that stood out, whether due to the sheer amount that fell in one go, or the kind of hardship it caused people in the area.

We'll start with the obvious: The most snow ever to fall in 24 hours.

Silver Lake, Colorado, April 14-15, 1921

To people in Buffalo wondering if the absurd snowfall totals blanketing their city are a new record, the answer is: Pretty close.

DON'T MISS: 10 Insane #BuffaloSnow tweets.

One part of the region, just outside Buffalo, may have got a total of 165 cm of snow over a 24-hour period, according to the Weather Underground. Which is, in fact, less than the all-time observed record snowfall in North America.

That crown is held by Silver Lake, in the mountains of Colorado, where an epic blizzard dumped 192 cm – almost two metres – of snow in a single day.

And the flakes didn’t stop once the 24th hour ran out. According to this paper in a 1950s meteorological journal, more than 250 cm of snow fell over 85 hours. 

The paper reads rather a bit like it was written by somebody who for years heard the story of Silver Lake and couldn’t shake the feeling that there was no way that was actually possible (turns out it was).

But if we’re going beyond the 24-hour cut-off, Wyoming County, east of Buffalo, also came a bit close to the record. According to National Weather Service figures (published in this Syracuse newspaper), a total of 223 cm may have fallen there over the four-day period the storm smashed the picturesque, though largely uninhabited site.

We doubt the people buried in their homes would quibble over the difference of a few centimeters, though.

Tahtsa Lake, B.C., February 11, 1999

Despite Canada's reputation as the land of winter, you may be surprised to find our country’s largest-ever 24-hour snowfall is actually considerably less than the staggering record set at Silver Lake, Colorado.

The most we ever managed was the paltry 145 cm that fell at Tahtsa Lake, B.C., on February 11, 1999, about up to chest-height on the average human being. 

Yes that was, in fact, in British Columbia.

Although Canada’s Pacific province is famed for the balmy winters of Vancouver and Victoria, the province’s north and interior are very, very different, especially the higher you get. Eight of Canada's ten largest single-day snowfalls are in B.C.

Tahtsa Lake isn’t burned into our cultural memory because the site, near Prince George, is mostly uninhabited. But it seems to be in a bit of a sweet spot for extreme snowfall. 

Nearby Lakelse Lake got 118 cm in January 1974, a little more than 25 years earlier.

Might be a cursed date, too. The very same day Tahtsa Lake entered the history books, the B.C. city of Terrace was walloped by 113 cm, earning it a top-ten spot also.

Saskatchewan, Winter 1947

Going through all of Canada’s history, every province has its “blizzard of the century.” We chose Saskatchewan’s winter of 1947 because it basically shut the whole place down.

This week-by-week lookback from the Oxbow Herald gives you an idea of how rapidly things went south on the Canadian Prairie. The storms started boxing day, and continued, on and off, for weeks.

We can just imagine the exasperation in the newsroom of the Regina Leader-Post in mid-January, 1947, when the front page read “Province Just One Big Snowdrift.” And even then, the worst was yet to come, with storm after storm finally culminating in a 10-day monster, ending on February 8, that Environment Canada calls the worst storm in Canadian railroad history.

Transportation shut down almost completely, with tracks shut for days or weeks, and some roads closed until the spring. Crews had to dig down for several metres just to find the tracks. Only the tops of telephone poles were visible in some districts.

Supplies in and out of the region slowed to a trickle. Home delivery was impossible, and people would struggle through the snows to central supply depots for their milk and other groceries. The sheer cold threatened coal supplies.

For farmers, it was a nightmare. One story holds that one man fed his chickens by tossing grain down through the coop chimney. Another cut a whole in his barn roof to keep his cattle fed, and still others went from home to shed in completely submerged snow tunnels.

We get the impression from the Leader-Post lookback that things slowly began to ease after mid-February, by which point an uncertain number of fatalities had been reported.

NEXT PAGE: Toronto and Montreal get their own blizzards of the century

Toronto and Montreal's epic blizzards

While nothing like Buffalo, the city of Toronto has a few snow events it can look back on with dread.

We’ll start with the city’s worst single-day snowfall, on December 11, 1944, when a storm deposited 48 cm on the city,  and a total of 57 cm over two days, blasted into deep snow drifts by strong winds.

It wasn’t a mere nuisance. At least 21 people were reported dead, including several who died of overexertion while shovelling. Services ground to a halt, and factories producing munitions and supplies for the war effort were forced to close briefly.

The city had another taste of winter’s wrath before the Third Millennium, during what Environment Canada calls Toronto’s snowstorm of the century. Over a two-week period in early January, a series of storms dumped 118 cm on the city, costing the city more than twice its entire annual snow removal budget. 

Famously, then-mayor Mel Lastman was forced to call in the army to help in the clean-up:

In Quebec, Montreal’s snowstorm of the century came on March 4, 1971. At least 17 people died, the power was out for days in some areas, and city crews had to cart away 500,000 truckloads of snow, according to Environment Canada. The Montreal Canadiens were forced to cancel the night’s game.

Some 43 cm fell over 24 hours, and 47 cm over the course of the storm, standing as the city’s one-day record until December 2012, when another storm dropped more than 45 cm on parts of the city, with more falling overnight as well.

The Great Storm of 1888

This monster storm slammed the northeastern United States from Washington, D.C., to Maine on March 11-12, 1888.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports more than 120 cm  fell on parts of New England, with 100 cm on New York and Pennsylvania, paralyzing the industrial heart of the country.

This look-back on a history site focused on the New York City subway says the storm’s strong winds piled the snow in drifts more than 10 m deep, such that some of the largest lasted until early July.

Fires started during the storm accounted for around $25 million in damages in the city, partly because the fire department, along with pretty much any other kind of service, wasn’t going anywhere in those conditions.

Plunging temperatures kept  the East River so thoroughly frozen,  people could walk to Manhattan from Brooklyn without having to set foot on the bridge, although tugboats soon put a stop to that by breaking up the ice.

It may be the deadliest storm in U.S. history, with an estimated death toll of 400, with half the deaths in New York, along with several sailors aboard 200 ships that were sunk or run aground.

1993 Storm of the Century

Not lightly is this powerful tempest called the storm of the century.

This storm was huge, powerful and far-ranging, tracking from the Gulf and Florida Panhandle up the U.S. east coast to Massachusetts, with its peak taking place between March 12 and March 13, 1993.

It spawned at least 11 tornadoes in Florida before dumping an estimated total of 54 cubic kilometres of snow onto states from Alabama to the northeast, according to NOAA. 

Locally, that translated into snowfall of 150 cm in the mountainous areas of the southern U.S., and up to 100 cm in New York State. 

The storm shattered snowfall and pressure records in many locations, with strong winds of more than 110 km/h blowing the snow into drifts several metres high.

In all, something like 40 per cent of the continental United States’ population was affected. 10 million customers were in the dark, some for days, and an estimated 300 people lost their lives.

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