Trouble from the Sky

U.S. citizens pumped, paddled, dug, abandoned their automobiles, froze, chased their hats, lit candles, ran for their lives and occasionally died as some of the foulest weather in history swept the nation from coast to coast.

Nature's ill-tempered attack began in a soft and sneaky way with warm rains on the Sierra Nevada Mountains. But rain melted snow, snow fed creek, creek swelled river, and before a husband could stagger upstairs with the best of the furniture, there was swirling water in thousands of parlors in California and Nevada.

The Truckee River swept hip-deep through the business district of Reno: it smashed floating trees into plate-glass windows, poured into hundreds of lobbies, showrooms and basements, and even forced round-the-clock gambling places to close up. On the California side of the mountains there were floods from Marysville south to Bakersfield; 15,000 were driven from their homes, crops were ruined, livestock drowned and 326,000 acres submerged.

Stalled Cities. While Westerners waded, one of the most sudden and violent storms in memory swept north up a wide tier of Eastern states. Blizzards almost completely paralyzed Ohio and Pennsylvania. Twenty inches of snow fell on Cleveland, 29 inches on Youngstown, 18 on Akron, 28 on Pittsburgh, 38 on Washington, Pa. The Pennsylvania Turnpike and virtually all other roads in both states were blocked by enormous drifts, airports closed, trains stopped or ran hours behind schedule. In Ohio, 20,000 cars were abandoned on the highways.

Wind, bitter cold and the smothering snowfall put a dozen big cities and scores of smaller ones almost completely out of operation. In Pittsburgh and Cleveland, newspapers and department stores shut up shop, steel plants and hundreds of other industrial works closed down; in Akron, Youngstown and Morgantown, W. Va., thousands of automobiles, trucks, cabs, buses and police cars were stalled inextricably. National Guardsmen patrolled Cleveland to prevent looting and used Sherman tanks to tow stalled trucks and cars from the drifts.

The South shivered in some of the lowest November temperatures ever recorded. Snow fell in Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia: the thermometer went down to 3 in Atlanta, 19 in Baltimore, 17 in Richmond, i below in Nashville, 17 in Charleston, 2 below in Asheville, N.C. Florida's oft-bedeviled 'citrus growers toiled with smudge pots in a battle to save their perishable crops.

Turn Around. Meanwhile over New York, New Jersey and New England, the edge of the storm clashed explosively with warm moist air from the Atlantic. Howling winds of hurricane force (gusts of more than 100 m.p.h. were recorded on New York's Bear Mountain, New Hampshire's Mount Washington) drove torrential rains across hundreds of miles of coast._ Trees were uprooted, roofs ripped off, windows caved in, telephone and power lines torn down and hundreds of thousands of people left without light or heat.

Service on New York subways was disrupted and suburban train lines were stopped. Stone cornices tumbled from high buildings, hitting automobiles and littering streets. The great winds backed up the tides, flooded stretches of Manhattan's waterfront and miles of low country in Staten Island and New Jersey. La Guardia Airport--hangars, runways, parked automobiles and all--was covered with water up to twelve feet deep, and a rising flood carried fish and swimming rats into a railroad terminal at Jersey City. For a time, the entire city of Portland, Me. was without electricity.

At week's end, the great land storm, which the Weather Bureau called the most violent of its kind ever recorded in the northeastern U.S., performed a unique feat of acrobatics. Instead of heading out to sea, it made a 180DEG turn and came howling back; blizzards began scourging the snow-smothered cities of Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia all over again.

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