Who Will Stop the Snow?

The Midwest digs out from its worst blizzard in memory

From Milwaukee to Muncie, from South Bend to St. Joe, wherever the four winds blow, they were blowing snow. The Midwest lay cold and, to a certain extent, lifeless last week under the region's worst blizzard in memory. Some 3 ft. of snow immobilized Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri and parts of Kansas, Michigan and Wisconsin. Temperatures dropped as low as 19DEG F below zero, putting a hard crust on the blanket and turning whole counties into blocks of ice. Said Allen Pearson, director of the National Weather Service's Severe Storms Forecast Center in Kansas City: "If you liken a storm to someone wringing out a towel, this one was just superefficient."

The "Blizzard of'79," as newspapers are calling it, is also a disaster of major proportions. At least 100 people died battling the elements and hundreds of millions of dollars were lost in snow-stalled production, sales and wages. In Chicago, hardest hit by the blizzard, virtually nothing worked for the entire week. O'Hare International airport, normally the world's busiest, was closed for a record 42 hours. More than 1,400 of the city's streets were blocked by drifts, many of them 12 ft. high. The estimated 300 million tons of snow that fell on Chicago closed schools for at least a week, halted the city's elevated rail system for days, kept firemen from reaching burning buildings, and forced critically short-staffed hospitals to import 1,000 pints of blood from Los Angeles. The city attached snowplows to garbage trucks, even fire trucks. Convoys of borrowed snow-fighting equipment rolled in from as far away as Quebec.

Across the flat Midwest farm lands, electricity and telephone lines snapped like dry spaghetti. Hundreds of cattle froze to death, and dairy farmers were forced to dump oceans of milk they could not get to market. In Lake Michigan, two Coast Guard cutters were trapped by giant ice floes. A 220-mile-long ice jam closed the Missouri River from Atchison, Kans., to Blair, Neb., backing up water and causing flooding in some places.

As in other disasters in other places, the storm summoned untapped reserves of resourcefulness and good will in many people. Three members of a family in New Liberty, Iowa, burned corncobs for four days to keep warm, before being rescued by National Guard troops. Neighbors in Chicago were holding block parties to shovel one another out. "If you want to know the truth," said Betty Lou Salzman of Chicago, "I love it. There's a kind of solidarity in this mini-disaster that I think people really like."

A few Midwestern businessmen were exhilarated by the storm. Wisconsin's eight snowblower manufacturers worked overtime trying to keep pace with demand. Curtis Barren, a Chicago AMC dealer, sold 37 four-wheel-drive Jeeps in five days (vs. a typical three or four). And with so many offices and factories idle, tens of thousands of housebound workers found themselves with a few days of holiday they had not expected. Governor James Thompson, after appealing to President Carter to declare 22 northern Illinois counties a disaster area, took a vacation -- to Florida. After two days of being roasted by the local press, he flew back into Chicago to suffer along with his constituents as they received a familiar forecast: more snow, ice and freezing rain.

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