This past week marked the 20th anniversary of one of the most powerful blizzards to strike the mid-Atlantic and northeastern United States. Simply referred to as the Blizzard of ‘96, the nor’easter paralyzed all of the major cities along the I-95 corridor from Washington D.C. to Boston with heavy snow and wind.
The storm came together in classic fashion, with cold air plunging south out of Canada meeting up with a developing low pressure system in the southeastern U.S. that was tapping into a lot of moisture out of the Gulf of Mexico. By January 6, the storm began to produce heavy, relentless snow in Virginia and Maryland, before slowly pushing its way north into Philadelphia, New York City and New England. But heavy snow wasn’t the only problem. The storm’s low pressure interacted with strong high pressure anchored over southern Canada and the northern U.S. to cause strong, gusty winds, sometimes exceeding 50 mph. This led to complete white out conditions, one of the necessary conditions for a storm to be classified as a blizzard.
MORECAST meteorologist Erik Pindrock was growing up in Reading, Pennsylvania during the time of the blizzard, which picked up more 30 inches of snow during the storm. “I remember vividly my dad opening the garage door to the house and finding a solid white wall of packed snow instead of our driveway. The snow had drifted almost over the garage,” according to Pindrock, who provided a photo of the seven foot high drifts in front of his house.
By the time the blizzard moved offshore of the New England coast early January 9, the storm was at or near the top of the record books for snowfall in many cities. The highest snow totals were in the mountains of eastern West Virginia, where as much as four feet of snow fell! Here are more totals for select cities:
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: 30.7” (all-time record)
Newark, New Jersey: 27.8”
Washington D.C/Dulles International Airport : 24.6”
Providence, Rhode Island: 24.0”
Baltimore, Maryland: 22.5”
New York City (Central Park): 20.2”
Boston, Massachusetts: 18.2”
According to the National Weather Service, the Blizzard of ‘96 killed 60 people (many of them from people who had heart attacks while shoveling snow) and caused $600 million in damage based off insurance claims. The storm also forced officials in New York City to close schools for the first time in 18 years. The storm also kept many federal employees in Washington D.C. from returning to work. Following a more than three week government shutdown due to a budget impasse, workers were scheduled to return to work on Monday, January 8, but the shutdown was extended by four days since many people could not dig themselves out of their driveways, much less travel over snow covered roads. Only essential employees such as National Weather Service meteorologists had to report to work.
Impacts from the storm continued a couple weeks later. During the second half of January, a sudden warm up combined with rain caused most of the snowpack from the storm to melt rapidly, causing several rivers and streams to flood their banks in Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and Washington D.C. This caused millions of dollars more in damage and killed an additional 30 people.