I wasn't living in Boston yet; Albany, instead. But at the time I was actually travelling by car out to California, and was in Texas when this particular storm caught up with me. Texas got iced over, the Rio Grande froze, the citrus crop was destroyed and I spent two nights in Big Spring. Two months later there were still semi's littering the roadside on Route 40 and elsewhere. This storm was the end of coastal residential development in New England. Between this storm and a few bad coastal storms that came over the next few years, thousands of homes were destroyed without being rebuilt, because the coast had already been rebuilt.
Now, I have a warning for your climate science denialists: Don't tell me that "global warming isn't real because 1978!!!" I'm not even going to explain why that is stupid. Just #STFU.
Anyway, here's a blast from the past for you:
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About 8 1/2 minutes into this video, meteorologist Harvey Leonard says, "I don't think there's a strong probability that we'll ever see anything like this again." Ever. Never.
Ahem ... As I write this at 2:00 a.m. Saturday, we have wind gusts of 50-70 mph, too much snow outside to assess from inside, and those good ol' blizzard sounds that -- if you grew up as I did in the Midwest -- were almost comforting as you snuggled in bed under the blankets at night. How can something so cold outside make one feel so "warm" inside? Ah, the power of memory.
Cambridge and Boston have no large-scale power outages ... YET. Uh, if we did I guess I wouldn't be writing this.
Joe, I hope you weather the weather!
Not only that but over the next few years that region had a handful of additional storms (bob, October storm, etc.) of similar magnitude with respect to the coastal effects. Then the super storms of the early 21st centrury. Etc.
We here in West Michigan were nailed with this storm as well. Western Michigan University was shut down for several days, reflecting the fact that Kalamazoo itself was effectively closed for the same amount of time. If you could cross-country ski, a much-more rare activity then than it is now, you could get about, even though nothing was open for several days. After the initial novelty (we could walk out our 3rd floor apartment window onto a snowbank blown against the building) it was not much fun, and has not, at least for me, become one of those incidents from years past that is remembered with the fondness that time's passage often creates.
I too wish Joseph well.