“The 1978 N’Easter hit upstate and N.E..............”
Boston got hit with one storm on Jan 20th that drop 21 inches, then the “Blizzard of 78” hit dropping another 28 inches two weeks later.
Then there was the tidal surge that destroyed thousands of homes - basically a winter hurricane.
I forgot about the tidal surge up there coming on the heels of the second storm. Was hard, hard winter that year.
But before the February blizzard, we had a soaking rainstorm in between, on January 26-27. Now that was a historic blizzard in the Midwest and when you talk about "Blizzard of '78" out there, that is the storm that comes to mind for them. But just rain on the East Coast as we were on the warm side. Still, that storm caused much havoc as people still hadn't cleared the piles of snow from around the storm drains and we had massive street flooding.
The February 6-7 blizzard took everybody by surprise. It wasn't until Sunday morning that people started getting excited about it. Even on that Monday morning, as I was getting ready for school, at least one of the Boston news stations was forecasting the storm to push out to sea.
Around 10:30 that morning on February 6, the temperature in Boston was still around 40 degrees but within the next hour, the winds picked up and temperature went to about 30. Around noon, it was announced that school was closing and that we were to get home as soon as possible.
I'll never forget walking back to my house that day. I lived close to Revere Beach and the winds were so strong that I had to turn around and walk backwards. It still hadn't snowed one flake.
Right around dusk, I'm thinking around 4 or 4:30, the "wall of snow" came over us. I mean it was a wall. It went to a complete whiteout within seconds. It snowed all night and into most of the next day. 27 inches officially in the city but most suburbs got 40 inches or more. Just a few blocks down the street from where I lived, they had no snow on the ground at all because the ocean came in and completely washed all the snow away.