Blizzards are to the Great Plains what hurricanes are to the Southern Coastlands.
In the text and lecture, we learned about the devastating 2005 Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Katrina was the costliest and one of the five deadliest hurricanes in United States' history, and Rita was the fourth-most intense Atlantic hurricane ever recorded. Nearly 1900 people died in Katrina and 120 died in Rita, some from indirect effects such as evacuations, storm surge flooding, drowning in off-shore rip currents, and injuries from fallen trees. The lecture states that the one-two punch of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita caused 20 feet and above storm surges. With the failure of New Orleans' levees, Katrina left behind 22 million tons of debris, amounting to 25 times the ruins left in the World Trade Center attack.
Devastation from Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, 2005
Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, 2005South Dakota is sometimes called the Blizzard State, and has recorded temperatures as low as 58 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. Blizzards are defined as violent, blinding snowstorms with very strong winds, extreme cold, and great amounts of snow, most of which is fine, dry snow picked up from the ground. The National Weather Service definition for a blizzard requires a wind speed greater than 32 miles per hour, temperature less than 20 degrees Fahrenheit, and visibility not greater than 500 feet. A blizzard is classified as severe when winds exceed 45 miles per hour, temperature is less than 10 degrees Fahrenheit, and visibility is less than 100 feet.
Train stuck in snowdrift near DeSmet, South Dakota, 1880s
The text states that "blizzards begin in winter when a very cold, polar air mass pushes south along the Rocky Mountains to meet moisture from a Pacific storm that has moved inland. High winds, intense cold, and considerable amounts of snow are typical of Plains blizzards." (p.239)
A dangerous type of blizzard is a whiteout. In whiteout conditions, downdrafts and snowfall are so thick it is difficult to distinguish the sky from the ground. People caught in whiteouts lose their sense of direction quickly, and pilots in the air are endangered because they cannot tell how close to the ground they are.
The Weather Service writes, "Blizzards are dangerous storms, possibly second only to tornadoes and hurricanes, and they demand the respect of all who must deal with them. Blizzards occasionally strike suddenly, filling a previously calm air with snow driven by strong winds which reduce visibility from miles to feet in minutes.
It was this feature of blizzards that brought terror to the pioneers and thereby furnished credence to the Dakota blizzard legends. The pioneers feared blizzards because they would strike without a hint of warning, frequently on a mild day, catching them miles from home or shelter on the open prairie. In nearly an instant after a blizzard struck, all vestiges of landmarks needed to guide them home would disappear, and death by freezing was the all-too-often result in those early days." The prairie was so vast, a homesteader disoriented in a blizzard might miss his house by a few feet and wander beyond it to the open prairie, where he would soon die without shelter or warmth.
"Now, the advance warning of impending blizzards given by the National Weather Service has greatly lessened the chances of being surprised by a blizzard, or even being stranded in one. Nearly all North and South Dakotans, while respectful of the consequences, now think of blizzards more as minor and temporary inconveniences to their normal lifestyle than as potential killers to be feared."
Man trying to walk during Great Blizzard, East Coast, 1888But killers they were. In the winter of 1888, just months before the Great Blizzard ravaged the Northeastern United States, killing 400 people and sinking 200 ships, a succession of blizzards terrorized the Great Plains. One of them, named the Schoolchildren's Blizzard, caught people on the prairie off guard because of the unusually balmy January weather that preceded it. For nearly a week the Plains suffered from brutally cold temperatures, but on January 11-12, a warm, moist front of air from the Gulf of Mexico produced a brief time of spring-like weather. People were out of their homes doing chores, getting supplies in town, walking to school, and just enjoying the warm weather when the blizzard struck. An advancing Arctic cold front colliding with the warm Gulf front caused a rapid drop in temperatures from above freezing to 20, and in some places, 40 degrees below zero. Accompanied by high winds and heavy snow, the fast-moving storm originated in Montana in the early morning hours of January 12th, swept across Dakota territory throughout the late morning and into the early afternoon, and reached the town of Lincoln, Nebraska by 3 p.m. the same day. Thousands of people, including many children on their way home from school, were caught in the blizzard.
The Schoolchildren's Blizzard, Great Plains, 1888 illustrated by Dick Taylor, 1974
Five years after the event, the Encyclopedia Brittanica of 1893 recorded,
"In one blizzard which visited Dakota and the states of Montana, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Texas in January, 1888, the mercury fell within twenty-four hours from 74 degrees above zero to 28 degrees below it in some places, and in Dakota went down to 40 degrees below zero. In fine clear weather, with little or no warning, the sky darkened and the air was filled with snow, or ice-dust, as fine as flour, driven before a wind so furious and roaring that men's voices were inaudible at a distance of six feet. Men in the fields and children on their way from school died ere they could reach shelter; some of them having been not frozen, but suffocated from the impossibility of breathing the blizzard. Some 235 persons lost their lives. This was the worst storm since 1864; the Colorado River in Texas was frozen with ice a foot thick, for the first time in the memory of man."
The Schoolchildren's Blizzard, Great Plains, 1888http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurrican Katrina
http://en.wikipedia.org/wikiHurrican Rita
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard
http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/habitat/climate/blizzard.htm
http://islandnet.com/~see/weather/events/childrensblizzard
http://www.wintercenter.homestead.comphotosblizzard.html
http://www.weather.com/blog/weather/archive/200610
http://56755blogspot.com/2009/09/reader-memories
Regional Landscapes of the United States and Canada, 2009
Laskin, David: The Children's Blizzard, 2005, Harper Perennial
The Encyclopedia Britannica, 1893
No comments:
Post a Comment