Even The Eskimos Froze

By John Langone

The little village of Coldfoot, Alaska, 50 miles north of the Arctic Circle, has long endured jokes about its name. But last week no one in Coldfoot -- or anywhere else in Alaska -- was in much of a mood to laugh about the temperature. For a whole month, the entire state had been gripped by one of the fiercest Arctic cold waves on record. Some towns in the interior registered temperatures as low as -75 degrees F for days a time. As for Coldfoot, an unconfirmed reading there two weeks ago put the temperature at -82 degrees, colder than the official North American record of -81 degrees set in the Canadian Yukon in 1947. Alaska Governor Steve Cowper declared a state of emergency, requesting everyone to stay indoors as much as possible.

By midweek, the icy blast had roared out of Alaska across western Canada and into the American Midwest. Driven by 100-m.p.h. winds and the strongest high- pressure system in North American history (barometers reached 31.85 in. of mercury), the frigid front generated mammoth snowstorms and in some areas dropped thermometer readings by as much as 70 degrees in a matter of hours.

Alaskans were relieved to be rid of the worst of the freeze, but it would take weeks to assess the toll on the state. Schools closed, businesses ground to a halt, and hardy villagers huddled in their homes to keep warm. Furnaces shut down as heating oil turned to jelly, and stoves stood idle as propane gas liquefied. The greatest hardships occurred in central Alaska, where normal food deliveries were cut off. Governor Cowper called out the Air National Guard to parchute supplies into remote villages.

Heavy steel equipment in the North Slope oil fields turned icily brittle and snapped into pieces. Military operations were disrupted. Most of the 26,000 Army, Air Force and Coast Guard personnel taking part in Operation Brim Frost, an Arctic training mission, were told to stay in their barracks. The Kusko 300, one of the state's major dog-mushing events, had to be postponed.

Even longtime Alaskans, who normally boast of basking in subzero weather, were wincing. Says Mitch Falk, manager of Aurora North Fuel in Deadhorse: "It's not too bad at 45 below, but 60 below takes it out of you." At the Corner Bar in Nenana, which is usually busy even in -25 degrees weather, no one was coming in for a cold beer.

When the frigid air mass finally began to move, it blew into western Canada, where the temperature in many cities plunged as low as -40 degrees F. The worst snowstorm in Edmonton since 1885 brought the city to a virtual standstill. In Calgary 100,000 grade-school children were told to stay home when the wind-chill factor reached -67 degrees, a level at which exposed flesh freezes in less than a minute.

South of the border, the cold wave brought a sudden end to unseasonably warm weather in the American West. In Great Falls, Mont., the temperature fell overnight from a high of 62 degrees to-10 degrees and then down to -34 degrees the next night. Over in Helena, the thermometer reading plummeted from 44 degrees to -6 degrees in just two hours. As far south as Valentine, Neb., a balmy high of 70 degrees turned to 0 degrees in ten hours.

Despite the cold front's ferocity, there were few casualties. In the places that were hardest hit, people were cautious. Martha Hirt of Fairbanks kept her seven school-age children indoors. "They're miserable because they can't play outside," she said. "We're trying to entertain ourselves by watching videos."

Why was it so cold? While winters are always frigid in the high latitudes of Alaska and Canada, the cold is usually mitigated by warm winds from the Pacific Ocean. This year, though, a mass of cold air called the Omega Block blew in from Siberia and settled over Alaska. A high-pressure zone got stuck between two low-pressure systems and stayed put over the state, keeping out the warming Pacific winds. By the time cold air moved out of Alaska and headed south, it had built up tremendous force.

Alaskans could at least take comfort from the knowledge that the weather could have been even worse. The state got nowhere close to the world's record low-temperature reading. That was a frosty -128.6 degrees F, recorded in faraway Antarctica in 1983.

With reporting by David Postman/Juneau, with other bureaus