CATASTROPHE: Spring Storm

A low pressure area, fitful with Spring, drifted eastward across the land last week, suddenly squatted over northern Indiana. Down to earth raced many winds, flapping from their wings an enormous flutter of feathery snow. Forty-four hours later when the low pressure area was ready to move on again, the Midwest was blanketed beneath one of its worst snowfalls in recorded weather history.

Snow fell as far south as Atlanta. Detroit and St. Louis were under a four-inch coating of winter. Rural roads in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan were impassably choked. The snowfall centred in Chicago where 19.1 inches, a record, swept down in 44 hours, to be twirled up by a 40-mile gale off Lake Michigan into ten-foot drifts.*

Like ants emerging from a wrecked sand hill, Chicago citizens twisted and wriggled themselves out of their white entombment, proclaimed their plight to the world. Street traffic stalled completely, until 20,000 shovelers dug narrow channels through the drifts. Schools all closed when attendance dropped to 20%. The snow even blanketed crime: not one case was docketed in Morals Court during the blizzard; only six robberies were reported to tho police. Abandoned automobiles along the streets were encased in soft bulgy white outlines. Railroad yards became chaotic as switches jammed. The Illinois Central put a long string of freight cars out along its lakefront line to serve as a snow fence. The city’s milk supply was sharply reduced while suburbanites subsisted on canned goods. Lifelines had to bo stretched on Michigan Avenue. One snow-blinded man was blown to death under a bus before the Drake Hotel. Nine other deaths were somehow attributed to the storm. The Sells-Floto Circus came to town from its winter headquarters at Peru. Ind., at the height of the blizzard. In the New York Central yards, 200 men tussled with half-crazed lions, tigers, monkeys, elephants, camels. Menagerie fatalities: two monkeys, two cockatoos, a springbok. Hearses never reached cemeteries. Big employers like Illinois Sell Telephone. Western Union, Western Electric, hired whole floors in Loop (downtown) hotels to house their snow-bound workers. Motoring to the Illinois State Farm at Vandalia with five prisoners, two deputy sheriffs were engulfed by drifts, had to borrow money from one prisoner to carry the penal party through by rail.

What disturbed Chicago officials most about last week’s storm was that, to street-clean, more than $100,000 had to be paid out of the city’s none-too-large tax ”rescue fund.”

*Chicago’s previous one-storm snowfall record, 14.8 inches, was set last December. New York’s most famed blizzard, with 20.9 inches fall, occurred March 12. 13. 14. 1888.