Snowbelt to Sunbelt, the Big Chill

Winter strikes with the worst December in decades

Winter is not a season, it is an occupation," said City Maintenance Supervisor Mike Vazzano, who has spent the past 20 winters trying to keep the streets of Omaha clear of snow. He added meekly, "I really don't enjoy it that much." Last week Vazzano had real cause to complain: after 6 in. of snow, the temperature dropped to 24DEG below zero, a record for that day. That was only one of the 70 low-temperature records broken from Washington State to Illinois on Thursday, the first official day of winter, as an arctic front swept in the coldest stretch of December weather in more than 50 years.

By week's end readings had gone as low as a heart-stopping -55DEG in Wisdom, Mont. Even the Sunbelt shivered. "This is the worst ice storm I've seen in years," said Fort Worth Policeman Henry Green, as the city froze over. "And I've seen some doozies."

In addition to the travails it caused travelers and shoppers, the cold carried with it a familiar deadly toll. In Grandview, Texas, an eight-year-old child died in a fire when her mother tried to use the kitchen stove as a heater. In Seattle, a bus driver collapsed and died while trying to shovel sand under his snow-locked bus. In all, more than 140 people died, victims in one way or another of the unusually bitter December.

The Great Plains and the Midwest were hit hardest by the air mass that rolled in from Canada. In Big Timber, Mont., the wind chill factor (a combination of 15-m.p.h. winds and temperatures of 40 below zero) made it feel as if it were -85DEG. In Minneapolis, the mercury fell to 29DEG below, the lowest in 82 years. Power failures kept thousands shivering in the dark. Lander, Wyo. (pop. 7,867), was blacked out for twelve hours; owners of wood-burning stoves invited strangers in to share the warmth. Even the Dynasty crowd loosened up under the chill: at the exclusive annual Denver Debutante Ball, hardly an eyebrow was raised when the cellist put a down "jacket on over his tuxedo to play. In Sioux Falls, S. Dak., the A.A.A. was so swamped with pleas from stranded motorists that it was forced to take phones off the hook for three hours, only the third time it had done so in 15 years.

In Texas, 17,000 passengers were stranded at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport after three planes skidded off the icy runway. Police reported more than 100 jackknifed tractor trailers, and by midweek the city of Dallas, where the temperature dropped to 11DEG, had come to a virtual standstill as government offices and businesses stayed closed. "I'm a native Texan, and this weather has just bamboozled me," said Welder Bobby Labar.

The National Weather Service in Washington, D.C., offers cautious consolation to those fearful of the months to come. "You would have to go back to the winter of 1977 to see one outbreak after another of record-breaking temperatures," said Long-Range Forecaster Donald Gilman. "The odds are against it." But a Chicago department-store sales clerk has her own fatalistic interpretation of the abnormally cold weather: "This is the payback for the little baby winter we had last year."