THE BLIZZARD OF ’96

IT WAS ERASURE ON A NEAR IMPOSSIBLE SCALE. FIRST the sky went blank, and then the ground. Then, in most places, your front steps disappeared, then your car; and finally, your schedule for the next 48 hours. How big was the snowstorm that hit the Eastern states early last week? So big that in each new place it bulldozed over, it toppled a different historical precedent. In New York City they compared it to the great storm of 1947. In Boston it was the blizzard of 1978. In Raleigh, North Carolina, the snow of 1989. That won’t happen next time. Whenever they do their recollecting, January 1996 will be the Last Big Storm for the entire East Coast.

It was a classic nor’easter that happened to stretch over 20 states and do tremendous damage. At least 100 lives were lost, many to heart attacks triggered by Sisyphean shoveling. Bill Clinton called the storm a “national disaster” and promised federal relief. In the New York region alone, an estimated $1 billion was lost to interrupted business and cleanup costs.Every region got more than it was prepared for. An inch of icy snow sufficed in Atlanta, where tractor-trailers skidded across highway lanes and the indoor Peachtree Center shopping area became deserted.

Twenty-four inches knocked out Washington; Philadelphia got a record 30.7, and New York City endured 20.6. Even jaded Boston, with 18.2 inches, postponed a Bruins hockey game (against the Colorado Avalanche).

“No trains, no cabs, no nothin’–just snow,” grumped a Manhattanite. Declared another: “I got here–that’s enough. You want me to work too?” In fact, commuters in several cities never got there at all, stranded overnight in trains. Some of the week’s cheerier air travelers ran luggage-cart races during enforced overnight stays in terminals up and down the coast. Many of the surlier ones, it seemed, were packed onto United Flight 801 from New York City to Tokyo, whose captain reportedly had to threaten arrest to maintain order when the plane was delayed 7 1/2 hours on the runway.

The storm evoked the classic range of human behaviors, from slick to tragic to elevated. Entrepreneurs in Reston, Virginia, asked $125 to shovel driveways. In Fountain Hill, Pennsylvania, a 60-year old shoved his 70-year-old neighbor for accusing him of dumping snow on his car, and the man fell and died. In New York, notwithstanding its recent rosy crime statistics, two men with a 9-mm pistol reportedly relieved Bronx building superintendent Robert DeJesus of his snowblower. But other city dwellers deferred elaborately to one another on narrow-shoveled walks. In Washington, Abby Stone and her two daughters made sandwiches all Monday morning and spent the afternoon delivering food and blankets to the homeless in their emerald-green Jeep Grand Cherokee.

The snow turned politicians into field marshals. New Jersey’s Governor Christine Todd Whitman posed in a snowplow. Hoboken, New Jersey’s, mayor, Anthony Russo, closed city streets to all but city residents, conjuring the image of a medieval city with the drawbridges up. Pennsylvania’s Lieut. Governor Mark Schweiker confirmed the worst nightmare of the print press by declaring that broadcast journalists qualified as “essential workers” and could therefore drive the streets early in the storm, while newspaper employees could not. Schweiker also announced that Pennsylvania’s 2,500-vehicle cleanup was “the largest civilian snow-removal fleet in the free world,” an assertion that certainly plays better as a fleeting soundbite, since New York State, next door, mounted a force of about 5,000.

Computer geeks heralded the triumph of the virtual office. One public relations firm sent out a fax crowing that all its employees had made it to work, since they all work at home. It should have included their cure for claustrophobia. Said a Connecticut mother to the New York Times, contemplating yet another snowed-in day with her kids: “Amanda and I are getting along. It’s Jordan you are going to see hung up by her toenails.”

Of course, the capital of cabin fever was the capital. Monday was the day the government was to reopen. But when the day arrived, the only open shop was the Supreme Court, with Justice David Souter catching a lift to work after failing to dig his Volkswagen Rabbit out of a drift. John Sturdivant, head of the American Federation of Government Employees, speculated, “It’s kind of God’s revenge on the craziness of Washington.”

One hopes there is no more of same in store. But on Friday, fat flakes fell once again along the seaboard. It looked to be a long winter.

–Reported by Sam Allis/Boston, Tamala M. Edwards/Washington, Elaine Rivera/New York and Diana Tollerson/Atlanta