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It Changed the Way We Lived Our LIves, October 10, 2003
This review is from: Storm of the Century: New England's Great Blizzard of 1978 (Paperback)
Tragedies of national significance can remain etched in the human psyche for an entire lifetime. Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy assassination, the Challenger disaster, September 11, the Columbia disintegration, and even the front line footage of the war in Iraq act as memory triggers for those who experienced them through the newspaper, radio, television or internet, not to mention those men, women and children who had the misfortune of witnessing them in person.
Tragedies of a regional or local nature can have the same effect. The only major difference is the number of people who share the memories. While almost any of the nearly three hundred million Americans around on September 11 can today meet in any coffee shop, health club or on any street corner in the nation and share their experiences of "where they were when they heard," much smaller segments of society can trade stories of localized tales like famous fires or powerful storms.
New England has reluctantly hosted many such events, from the opening days of the American Revolution onward. And although the impact of the event has been lost since the last living witness passed on, one can almost imagine the feelings of insecurity that must have run through the streets of Boston as British regulars and Colonial troops fired upon each other in pitched battles in and around the city.
A coastal region like New England is impacted most severely by the forces of Mother Nature, strong winds, surging seas, and heavy snows. The great gales of the past grow less significant to modern memory as time passes, but events such as the Minot's Light Gale of April 16, 1851, the Portland Gale of 1898, the Hurricane of 1938, and Hurricane Carol of 1954, to name just a few examples, all tested the residents of New England to their limits, and stayed in the minds of their survivors long after the last gust of wind had dissipated.
When anyone over the age of thirty who has lived in southern New England for their entire life is asked about the most significant natural event he or she can remember, without a doubt the answer will involve memories of the Blizzard of 1978.
Christopher Haraden of Hull, Massachusetts, was just seven years old when the storm simply known to its survivors as "The Blizzard" struck New England. He remembers listening to radio stations rerunning summer weather reports at the height of the storm as a diversion to the mayhem outside his windows, helping his father in the town's emergency relief efforts, and wondering innocently why families at the relief center wouldn't just simply go home days after the storm had ended. He later learned just how many families had no homes to go home to.
Although his career path took him well away from local news as he grew up, after becoming the youngest person in the history of the state of Massachusetts to serve on a local historical commission and working as editor of the Hull Times, those memories lingered as he moved through life. After whetting his appetite by contributing to the production of a book on the history of his hometown, as the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Blizzard of 1978 approached, he decided to combine his research, writing and interviewing skills and publish his first solo-authored book, Storm of the Century: New England's Great Blizzard of 1978.
"The Blizzard changed the way that people lived on the South Shore of Massachusetts," he said in a recent interview.
But Storm of the Century is not just about the South Shore. "It could have been. There's no doubt that an entire book could have been written specifically about the impact the Blizzard had on Hull and Scituate alone. In fact, the recovery story in Hull was one of the larger stories of the entire history of the storm. And so much more could be written about how it changed specific neighborhoods. My intention was to tell the story of the entire storm from beginning to end across the entire northeast region."
And although the title may seem cliche, as writers over the course of time have resorted to such superlatives all too frequently and easily in search of sales, Haraden deftly lays out his rationale for its use in a well-researched and presented opening chapter on the science of the storm, proving that the Blizzard dumped more snow on Boston than any other storm in recorded history. "We've had a lot of snow from some storms, and we've had a lot of flooding, but we've never had both come together like we did in February 1978," he said. Twenty-seven inches of snow and tides two and a half feet above normal combined to create New England's storm of the century, a meteorological disaster that claimed more than fifty lives before it was over.
Comparisons will inevitably arise, as well they should, to other storms. Historians may argue that the Portland Gale was more destructive and caused more hardship. Differences arise, though, that make comparisons difficult to rely on. Were people more apt to be affected by the cold during the Blizzard of 1978? In 1898, people along the New England coast were lucky to even have an electric light in their bedroom, never mind electric heat. Their heat came from wood and coal stoves, and due to the appalling number of ships that wrecked during the storm, driftwood and lost cargoes of coal washed ashore for months as renewable, free heat sources. Folks that lost their electric heat during the Blizzard faced the possibility of freezing to death. The argument could be made, therefore, that the Blizzard, because of New Englanders' increasing reliance on new technologies that failed during the storm, was for the region the most devastating storm in its entire history.
Thoroughly illustrated with photos gathered from the Army Corps of Engineers, various New England newspapers, the National Archives and private collections, Haraden's recounting of the storm vividly portrays Mother Nature at her worst and the people of New England at their best, as they pull together to survive one of the most destructive natural events in the region's history. The stories of the Blizzard of 1978 will fade from living memory as with the storms that came before. Haraden's book has caught its fury for all time.
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