Storms in History

"The Children's Blizzard"--so called in a book by David Lasker--killed 235, mostly children who had gone to school lightly clothed on an unseasonably warm day only to be trapped in a sudden storm from the north. At one point the temperature dropped 18 degrees in 3 minutes. By morning is was -40. "By morning on Friday, January 13, 1888, more than a hundred children lay dead on the Dakota-Nebraska prairie" (David Lasker) along with teachers and families trying to find and protect them. Later that year a massive storm hit the East Coast from Chesapeake Bay to Canada on March 11. It raged for four days, leaving people trapped in their homes for another 10 days. As much as 50 inches of snow fell, temperatures were in the single digits with winds more than 45 mph and gusts of 80 mph. More than 400 people died. A quarter of them were sailors, trapped on their boats. Half the death toll was from New York. Everything stopped. There were snowdrifts 50 feet deep. Fires raged because fire trucks couldn’t respond due to impassable roads. Damage was estimated at $25 million; that would be more than $26 billion today. One can only imagine what such a storm now would do to our fragile minds.