40 years later, Blizzard of ’78 holds crown as blockbuster
January 1978 was one of the stormiest months in recorded history on the East Coast.
A storm on Jan. 20-21, originally forecast to be mostly a rainstorm, dumped about 18 inches of snow in Central Massachusetts, and a storm on Jan. 25-27 paralyzed the Midwest while being dubbed that region’s Blizzard of 1978. That storm hit with heavy rains, high winds and warm temperatures that melted much of the snowbanks in Central Massachusetts from the storm a few days earlier.
A combination of snow, ice and faulty construction that caused the roof of the Hartford Civic Center to collapse about 4:15 a.m. on Jan. 17 was a foreshadowing of the damaging, deadly temper tantrum the winter of 1978 was about to throw.
Then New England’s famed Blizzard of ’78 hit on Feb. 6-7.
“When it comes to snowstorms, that is the king of the hill,” said Bob Copeland, who was a meteorologist at that time for WCVB-TV in Boston.
“That is a storm that is going to be with me forever,” said WCVB chief meteorologist Harvey Leonard, who was just starting his career on Boston television.
The blizzard caused the death of about 100 people, millions of dollars of damage along the coastline and massive traffic jams on highways in Central and Eastern Massachusetts as people leaving work, at a time when there were few four-wheel drive vehicles, got caught in blinding, wind-whipped snow that buried their vehicles.
“When it comes to snowstorms, that is the king of the hill,” said Bob Copeland, who was a meteorologist at that time for WCVB-TV in Boston.
“That is a storm that is going to be with me forever,” said WCVB chief meteorologist Harvey Leonard, who was just starting his career on Boston television.
The blizzard caused the death of about 100 people, millions of dollars of damage along the coastline and massive traffic jams on highways in Central and Eastern Massachusetts as people leaving work, at a time when there were few four-wheel drive vehicles, got caught in blinding, wind-whipped snow that buried their vehicles.
Worcester, recalled sliding down Arcadia Street in the city, across Grafton Street into the South Plaza shopping center during and after the storm.
That prompted Wormtown to name a beer three years ago called the “Blizzard of ’78.”
The label on the bottle sums it up this way: “The storm by which all storms are measured. Our winter offering pays tribute to those who were there and those who have endured hearing about it over and over again.”
Mr. Fields, like many in the area, said his family couldn’t get out of the front door of their house after the storm ended.
“For an 8-year-old kid, it didn’t get any better than that, sledding every day and no school for three weeks. If you were 20 or 30 years old and you had to go to work, it was a different story.”
Take 19-year old Richard B. Cavalieri, for example, who is the assistant director of streets and sanitation for Worcester’s DPW.
Mr. Cavalieri was a private contractor at the time of the blizzard, and his job was to plow the Grafton Hill area of the city where Mr. Fields lived with his new 1-ton Chevrolet Scottsdale-30 pickup truck.
Many of the streets on Grafton Hill were still dirt roads in 1978 and
Mr. Cavalieri got stuck on Emery Street at about 2 a.m. on Tuesday.
“It was brutal,” he said. “You couldn’t see anything in front of you and the snow was halfway up my truck’s doors.”
In a time when there were no cellphones, Mr. Cavalieri said he was rescued by a driver with a bulldozer who attached a chain to his truck and pulled him out of the rapidly rising snow.
Once he got back on the road, he followed the bulldozer as its driver opened up the roads in front of him.
Mr. Cavalieri worked nonstop until Wednesday when he went home for some rest before being called back for snow removal. He said his supervisor was so impressed with the work he had done during the storm he encouraged him to apply for a job with the city and he was hired in August 1978.
“I guess you could say the blizzard changed my life,” said Mr. Cavalieri.
While Mr. Cavalieri was working on the streets of Grafton Hill, Mr. Coyle, who was 11 at the time, worked with his mother to clear the driveway of his home in Rochdale so his father who was working the 3-11 p.m. shift at the East Central Street branch of the U.S. Postal Service office in the city, could get in the house.
It was a losing battle.
“The wind was so bad the driveway kept filling up with snow as soon as we cleared it off,” he said while also noting his father, who stayed overnight at the post office, later told him a small section of the building’s roof collapsed during the storm.
Weather-computer modeling was in its infancy in 1978 but by Saturday, Feb. 4, meteorologists knew a fierce storm was going to hit the area.
Mr. Leonard said he remembered talking to the late David Brudnoy, WBZ radio talk-show host, on Thursday, Feb. 2.
“He said to me, ‘You’re pretty confident that this is going to happen, aren’t you?’ ”
Mr. Leonard was, and during the weekend before the storm he told his viewers to be ready for a really big storm that could bury the area and cause major damage along the coast.
Like many weather people, Mr. Leonard is a snow enthusiast and did his best to control his emotions while warning people the weekend before the storm to get ready.
“I was exhausted before the storm even hit,” he said.
Mr. Leonard went to work early on Monday and as he left he told his wife who was six months pregnant that he might not be back home for a while.
He didn’t return home until Friday.
Robert M. Thompson, the meteorologist-in-charge of the National Weather Service office in Taunton, was an intern in the Albany NWS at the time. He told his father, who was visiting relatives in Connecticut on Saturday, to get home to Cohasset by Monday.
“I said this storm could be really big and that it could be bigger than the one a couple of weeks earlier,” Mr. Thompson said while noting his father at first considered his son’s prediction to be one of youthful exuberance.
Mr. Copeland said there was some concern because the storm that was forecast to start early on Monday morning had not started by noon. He said by then heavy snow was falling in New York City and he knew the storm was about to hit hard.
“It came in like a wall about 1 p.m.,” Mr. Copeland said.
By 2:30 p.m., visibility was so low that drivers on Interstate 495
between Route 9 and the Massachusetts Turnpike had to use the snowbanks
on the side of the road as a way to stay in a relatively straight line
on the increasingly snow-filled highway.
By 5 p.m. the area was in a standstill.
Former Auburn Town Clerk Elizabeth Prouty was working in the office that day and she struggled to give then-Town Clerk Doris Hill a ride home from Town Hall to nearby Temple Street in her Ford Pinto station wagon. She got stuck in Ms. Hill’s driveway and her husband, Ronald, came to her rescue in their front-wheel-drive Audi.
“You couldn’t see anything,” she said. “The snow was halfway up my doors. It really was the storm of a lifetime for us.′
Mr. Burbank, who said the storm would have been much worse if the snow had been wet and heavy, said he always thought Worcester was in the 26- to 28-inch snowfall range while Mr. Copeland surmised high winds may have simply blown some of the snow away from where it was measured at the 1,009-foot-high Worcester Regional Airport.
“I think the snow got blown away from the airport down into the city,” said Wormtown’s Mr. Fields.
Mr. Thompson said storms as severe as the 1978 blizzard have bands that bring heavy snow to some areas. Those bands are surrounded by areas where there is less snow. Radar in 1978 was not advanced enough to detect those bands, he added.
Mr. Thompson stressed that if a storm like the Blizzard of ’78
occurred today, conference calls with emergency officials would be made
several days ahead of time to avoid what happened on the state’s roads
during that storm.
“With the technology we have today, we would be far more proactive,” Mr. Thompson said.
Area residents are familiar with the rush on food in area supermarkets before a big storm that Massachusetts Food Association President Christopher P. Flynn acknowledged started with the 1978 blizzard.
Mr. Flynn recalled using sleds with his three brothers to go to a grocery store in the Boston area Tuesday afternoon after the ferocity of the storm abated.
He also remembered how his mother’s sister got to work at a Boston hospital from her house in Brighton.
“The National Guard picked her up in a tank, I’ll always remember that,” he said.
(Tuesday: Worcester and Central Mass. towns grapple with storm and aftermath)
A storm on Jan. 20-21, originally forecast to be mostly a rainstorm, dumped about 18 inches of snow in Central Massachusetts, and a storm on Jan. 25-27 paralyzed the Midwest while being dubbed that region’s Blizzard of 1978. That storm hit with heavy rains, high winds and warm temperatures that melted much of the snowbanks in Central Massachusetts from the storm a few days earlier.
A combination of snow, ice and faulty construction that caused the roof of the Hartford Civic Center to collapse about 4:15 a.m. on Jan. 17 was a foreshadowing of the damaging, deadly temper tantrum the winter of 1978 was about to throw.
Then New England’s famed Blizzard of ’78 hit on Feb. 6-7.
“When it comes to snowstorms, that is the king of the hill,” said Bob Copeland, who was a meteorologist at that time for WCVB-TV in Boston.
“That is a storm that is going to be with me forever,” said WCVB chief meteorologist Harvey Leonard, who was just starting his career on Boston television.
The blizzard caused the death of about 100 people, millions of dollars of damage along the coastline and massive traffic jams on highways in Central and Eastern Massachusetts as people leaving work, at a time when there were few four-wheel drive vehicles, got caught in blinding, wind-whipped snow that buried their vehicles.
“When it comes to snowstorms, that is the king of the hill,” said Bob Copeland, who was a meteorologist at that time for WCVB-TV in Boston.
“That is a storm that is going to be with me forever,” said WCVB chief meteorologist Harvey Leonard, who was just starting his career on Boston television.
The blizzard caused the death of about 100 people, millions of dollars of damage along the coastline and massive traffic jams on highways in Central and Eastern Massachusetts as people leaving work, at a time when there were few four-wheel drive vehicles, got caught in blinding, wind-whipped snow that buried their vehicles.
Worcester, recalled sliding down Arcadia Street in the city, across Grafton Street into the South Plaza shopping center during and after the storm.
That prompted Wormtown to name a beer three years ago called the “Blizzard of ’78.”
The label on the bottle sums it up this way: “The storm by which all storms are measured. Our winter offering pays tribute to those who were there and those who have endured hearing about it over and over again.”
Mr. Fields, like many in the area, said his family couldn’t get out of the front door of their house after the storm ended.
“For an 8-year-old kid, it didn’t get any better than that, sledding every day and no school for three weeks. If you were 20 or 30 years old and you had to go to work, it was a different story.”
Take 19-year old Richard B. Cavalieri, for example, who is the assistant director of streets and sanitation for Worcester’s DPW.
Mr. Cavalieri was a private contractor at the time of the blizzard, and his job was to plow the Grafton Hill area of the city where Mr. Fields lived with his new 1-ton Chevrolet Scottsdale-30 pickup truck.
“It was brutal,” he said. “You couldn’t see anything in front of you and the snow was halfway up my truck’s doors.”
In a time when there were no cellphones, Mr. Cavalieri said he was rescued by a driver with a bulldozer who attached a chain to his truck and pulled him out of the rapidly rising snow.
Once he got back on the road, he followed the bulldozer as its driver opened up the roads in front of him.
Mr. Cavalieri worked nonstop until Wednesday when he went home for some rest before being called back for snow removal. He said his supervisor was so impressed with the work he had done during the storm he encouraged him to apply for a job with the city and he was hired in August 1978.
“I guess you could say the blizzard changed my life,” said Mr. Cavalieri.
While Mr. Cavalieri was working on the streets of Grafton Hill, Mr. Coyle, who was 11 at the time, worked with his mother to clear the driveway of his home in Rochdale so his father who was working the 3-11 p.m. shift at the East Central Street branch of the U.S. Postal Service office in the city, could get in the house.
“The wind was so bad the driveway kept filling up with snow as soon as we cleared it off,” he said while also noting his father, who stayed overnight at the post office, later told him a small section of the building’s roof collapsed during the storm.
Weather-computer modeling was in its infancy in 1978 but by Saturday, Feb. 4, meteorologists knew a fierce storm was going to hit the area.
Mr. Leonard said he remembered talking to the late David Brudnoy, WBZ radio talk-show host, on Thursday, Feb. 2.
“He said to me, ‘You’re pretty confident that this is going to happen, aren’t you?’ ”
Mr. Leonard was, and during the weekend before the storm he told his viewers to be ready for a really big storm that could bury the area and cause major damage along the coast.
Like many weather people, Mr. Leonard is a snow enthusiast and did his best to control his emotions while warning people the weekend before the storm to get ready.
Mr. Leonard went to work early on Monday and as he left he told his wife who was six months pregnant that he might not be back home for a while.
He didn’t return home until Friday.
Robert M. Thompson, the meteorologist-in-charge of the National Weather Service office in Taunton, was an intern in the Albany NWS at the time. He told his father, who was visiting relatives in Connecticut on Saturday, to get home to Cohasset by Monday.
“I said this storm could be really big and that it could be bigger than the one a couple of weeks earlier,” Mr. Thompson said while noting his father at first considered his son’s prediction to be one of youthful exuberance.
Mr. Copeland said there was some concern because the storm that was forecast to start early on Monday morning had not started by noon. He said by then heavy snow was falling in New York City and he knew the storm was about to hit hard.
“It came in like a wall about 1 p.m.,” Mr. Copeland said.
By 5 p.m. the area was in a standstill.
Former Auburn Town Clerk Elizabeth Prouty was working in the office that day and she struggled to give then-Town Clerk Doris Hill a ride home from Town Hall to nearby Temple Street in her Ford Pinto station wagon. She got stuck in Ms. Hill’s driveway and her husband, Ronald, came to her rescue in their front-wheel-drive Audi.
“You couldn’t see anything,” she said. “The snow was halfway up my doors. It really was the storm of a lifetime for us.′
Mr. Burbank, who said the storm would have been much worse if the snow had been wet and heavy, said he always thought Worcester was in the 26- to 28-inch snowfall range while Mr. Copeland surmised high winds may have simply blown some of the snow away from where it was measured at the 1,009-foot-high Worcester Regional Airport.
“I think the snow got blown away from the airport down into the city,” said Wormtown’s Mr. Fields.
Mr. Thompson said storms as severe as the 1978 blizzard have bands that bring heavy snow to some areas. Those bands are surrounded by areas where there is less snow. Radar in 1978 was not advanced enough to detect those bands, he added.
“With the technology we have today, we would be far more proactive,” Mr. Thompson said.
Area residents are familiar with the rush on food in area supermarkets before a big storm that Massachusetts Food Association President Christopher P. Flynn acknowledged started with the 1978 blizzard.
Mr. Flynn recalled using sleds with his three brothers to go to a grocery store in the Boston area Tuesday afternoon after the ferocity of the storm abated.
He also remembered how his mother’s sister got to work at a Boston hospital from her house in Brighton.
“The National Guard picked her up in a tank, I’ll always remember that,” he said.
(Tuesday: Worcester and Central Mass. towns grapple with storm and aftermath)
***************************************
40 years after Blizzard of ’78, Worcester recalls grappling with aftermath
Then-Bishop Bernard J. Flanagan of the Worcester Catholic Diocese
postponed the observance of Ash Wednesday, Feb. 8, 1978, by granting
dispensation to Roman Catholics from the obligation of fasting and
abstinence. Also, because of the blizzard, the bishop allowed pastors to
distribute sacramental ashes at weekend Masses.
Performances by Steve Allen at Mechanics Hall and Art Garfunkel at the Worcester Memorial Auditorium were postponed because of the storm.
While there have been bigger snowfalls in Worcester - including the then-record 24-inch snowfall that fell on Feb. 14 and 15, 1962 - nothing has rivaled the Blizzard of ’78 for sheer intensity and ability to put the city’s operations, businesses, schools and roadways at a virtual standstill.
On the evening of Monday, Feb. 6, then-City Councilors Joseph M. Tinsley, John B. Anderson and Michael J. Donoghue showed up at City Hall for a City Council Public Works Committee meeting.
Behind the wheel of his station wagon, Mr. Donoghue said he left early from Bay State Abrasives in Westboro, traveled down Route 9 and onto Shrewsbury Street in Worcester before getting to downtown Worcester.
Usually, this route would take Mr. Donoghue 20 to 30 minutes. That night, it took him well over an hour.
“It just started snowing in the afternoon. By the time I left Westboro, it was really coming down good,” Mr. Donoghue said last week. “Just driving in, it didn’t look like a regular storm. It was too heavy. It was blowing.”
The three city councilors, the then-Department of Public Works Commissioner F. Worth Landers, then-Assistant Department of Public Works Commissioner Richard J. Grant and then-Department of Public Works supervisor Robert L. Moylan were conducting business as usual until they received an alarming weather update.
“You’ve got the big windows at City Hall. You look out the big windows. You don’t see the T&G sign (across the street at 20 Franklin St). It was all snow,” Mr. Donoghue said. “A public works official came in to tell Worth the latest bulletin, and Worth said, ‘We just got an update on the weather. It has turned bad, real bad.’ ”
With the agenda tabled for another day, there was just one more problem that needed to be addressed: How were the councilors going to get home? They weren’t going to make it in their cars, so they had only one choice: Hitch a ride in a DPW vehicle.
“I was (previously) the director of public works in Portland, Maine, so I was used to getting snow that was 24, 26, 28 and 32 inches,” Mr. Landers said last week. “Worcester got a big storm that was certainly over a foot, maybe 18 inches, about five days before the big blizzard. So our roads already had fairly big windrows from the plows. So we were already cleaning up into section from the storm five days before when the blizzard hit.”
And when the blizzard hit, Mr. Landers said, the DPW came out in full force and, for the next several days, never let up. By mid-afternoon Monday, 400 plows were trying to keep up with Worcester’s snow at a cost of $10,000 an hour.
“We were on a 24-hour schedule because we had to remove snow and open up the minor roads and streets that the plows couldn’t get to often enough to keep them open,” Mr. Landers said. “It was a long operation, around the clock for some number of days, one after another.”
After the blizzard was over and the streets were cleared, motorists and pedestrians had to deal with dangerous blind spots on the roadways caused by huge snowbanks that were there for a long time, Mr. Landers said.
“When every street was open, the intersections were very difficult to
get around and we spent a lot of time cleaning the intersections up so
when cars came from right angles to each other, they could see each
other coming,” Mr. Landers said. “Some of those small residential
streets, particularly dead-end ones, we didn’t get them cleared out for
days. They had to be cleaned out by either a front-end loader coming in
and getting the snow and dumping it into a truck or a big snowblower in
one of the vehicles blowing it into the truck. And that takes quite a
lot of time.”
The city faced a serious Catch-22 situation. The streets couldn’t be plowed because of all the stranded cars, while the cars couldn’t be moved because the streets weren’t plowed. For days, main roadways - including Gold Star Boulevard, Route 9 and Interstate 290 - were impassable.
“Biggest problem was people who didn’t get their cars off the road early enough and then got snowed in,” Mr. Landers continued. “And actually, in removing snow on some of these streets that were snowed in because we couldn’t get our plows into during the storm, we had to be careful you didn’t hit a car that was parked and covered with snow.”
“You see these humps on the side of the road. They were cars,” Mr. Donoghue added. “I remember we’re going down the streets and the driver (then DPW employee Patrick J. O’Rourke) said, ‘There’s a car there.’ I said, ’How do you know?” He said, ‘You see that thing that’s shiny? That’s an antenna.
That’s a car.’ ... The whole city was shut down for four days, and for four days it was so bad. They had to bring the National Guard in. It was unheard of.”
Lt. Col. Thomas P. Laurino was the commanding officer of the 1st Battalion, 181st Infantry, National Guard, during the blizzard. A month later, 209 National Guardsmen received the Massachusetts Emergency Service Ribbon for helping the city.
“The orders were to help out the people in the area who couldn’t get food, who couldn’t get to their homes or were sick and needed transportation to hospitals. We did a tremendous amount of it,” Mr. Laurino recalled last week. “The only reason I knew that everything had let up on the outside enough and we were not required to be there any longer is one of my people came to me and said, ’You know, Colonel, a woman called in and said, “You know that nice guy who picked me up the other day? Can you send him back here again today?″ I said, ‘I think everything’s OK now.’ ”
During their blizzard deployment in Worcester, the National Guard evacuated 95 residents from Park Hill Manor Nursing Home because of the threat of a collapsing roof.
Also, the guard transported doctors, nurses and medical supplies
where they were needed, shoveled out cars and fire hydrants buried in
snowdrifts, and completed dozens of other tasks to help dig the city out
of the blizzard.
“The first week was a horror show. We could barely get there,” Mr. Laurino said. “But everyone showed up and everyone did their job and everybody felt good about it when they were done.”
On Wednesday, Feb. 8, National Guardsmen discovered the body of Norman J. Cardin, 20, of Millbury, in his car, buried in snowdrifts on the West Main Street on-ramp of I-290 in Shrewsbury. The apparent cause of Mr. Cardin’s death was ruled carbon monoxide poisoning.
Mr. Cardin was not the only casualty directly related to the blizzard in Central Massachusetts.
Theodore LeDoux, 56, of Putnam, and Enos G. Kilman, 67, of Fitchburg both suffered fatal heart attacks while shoveling snow in front of their homes.
John P. Guilfoil, 61, of Ayer, was discovered in a snowdrift outside his office at 9 Norwich St., Worcester. Mr. Guilfoil, who was the state director of welfare services for Worcester, died of natural causes.
One of the most heartbreaking stories in Central Massachusetts in the aftermath of the blizzard was the body of 10-year-old Peter Gosselin, who had gone out to shovel snow on Feb. 7, 1978, and was discovered 20 days later buried in a snowdrift a few feet from his Uxbridge home.
While many restaurants closed early because of the blizzard, Robert
“Gus” Giordano, owner of Maxwell-Silverman’s Toolhouse, 25 Union St.,
kept his restaurant open as a haven for stranded pedestrians, motorists,
telephone workers, police officers and medical personnel, as well as
his own workers.
“We were open. Then it became a state of emergency. And some of our waiters, we called in because we were very close with the hospital at that time and some of the doctors came in, so we started staying open for them. I made one of the waiters come in. ‘If you don’t come in, you’re fired.’ So we had to get him in a police cruiser,” Mr. Giordano said this week. “We were feeding the policemen next door. They’d come over. People abandoning their cars, they were trudging in. We were taking care of them, giving them free coffee.”
On the afternoon of Feb. 6, 1978, Mr. Giordano went on the radio to announce Maxwell-Silverman’s Toolhouse was open to any and all stranded at Lincoln Square or coming in off the expressway nearby.
Soon Mr. Giordano came to the realization that he was one of the stranded, and he and his hired help weren’t going anywhere for a few days. So he decided to make the best of it.
“It got late. No one’s going anywhere. So out comes the music because we were famous for dining and dance. The TV was there. The music was over there. The kitchen was in there. And my help could go cook whatever they wanted,” Mr. Giordano recalled. “They just joked around, stayed in touch with their parents, and the big thing was playing hide and go seek. And we played hide and go seek for three days. It was like a bunch of adults getting stuck in Chuck E. Cheese’s.”
Norton S. Remmer was the commissioner of the Department of Code Inspection for Worcester during the blizzard.
“The thing that sticks in my mind the most was getting from my house to the car with the city manager, the police and fire chief, just trying to get there before anything was shoveled and moved,” Mr. Remmer recalled this week. “The snow was up to my waist. There were massive amounts of snow but we were able to get to a lot of the roads and I think they cleared Coolidge Road (where Mr. Remmer lived at the time) to get me out of there, my side benefit.”
Mr. Remmer said he was one of the city officials who would drive
around the city to check around for roofs in danger of collapsing
because of the snow.
“The snow loads (the maximum in building code regulations) on roofs have gone up several times in this area,” Mr. Remmer said. “We were probably at something like 30 pounds per square foot, and now the base is 50 pounds per square foot, depending on what kind of environment that’s around you. If it’s hills or if it’s flat or if there’s nothing around you, the loads go up or go down. But it’s more accurate nowadays.”
Because of the blizzard, the roofs did cave in on a section of the main post office on East Central Street in Worcester, the George J. Meyer Manufacturing Co. in West Boylston and at the North Star Youth Forum in Westboro.
“For this area, I don’t recall anything quite that bad. Everything came to a standstill,” Mr. Remmer said. “It was really three or four days before things could get organized. There were masses of plows and backhoes taking the snow out and dumping it. Any open areas they could find, they would dump it.”
In a Feb. 22, 1978, article in the Worcester Telegram, then-Assistant Public Works Commissioner Richard J. Grant was quoted as saying 250 trucks and 35 front-end loaders had been working 16 hours a day since Feb. 10 to remove the snow. The city’s goal was to haul away one-third of the snow plowed or 300 curb miles. In the same article, Michael J. Burke, then engineer in the Traffic Department, calculated that the city hauled away 615.6 million pounds of snow after the blizzard.
Performances by Steve Allen at Mechanics Hall and Art Garfunkel at the Worcester Memorial Auditorium were postponed because of the storm.
While there have been bigger snowfalls in Worcester - including the then-record 24-inch snowfall that fell on Feb. 14 and 15, 1962 - nothing has rivaled the Blizzard of ’78 for sheer intensity and ability to put the city’s operations, businesses, schools and roadways at a virtual standstill.
On the evening of Monday, Feb. 6, then-City Councilors Joseph M. Tinsley, John B. Anderson and Michael J. Donoghue showed up at City Hall for a City Council Public Works Committee meeting.
Behind the wheel of his station wagon, Mr. Donoghue said he left early from Bay State Abrasives in Westboro, traveled down Route 9 and onto Shrewsbury Street in Worcester before getting to downtown Worcester.
Usually, this route would take Mr. Donoghue 20 to 30 minutes. That night, it took him well over an hour.
“It just started snowing in the afternoon. By the time I left Westboro, it was really coming down good,” Mr. Donoghue said last week. “Just driving in, it didn’t look like a regular storm. It was too heavy. It was blowing.”
The three city councilors, the then-Department of Public Works Commissioner F. Worth Landers, then-Assistant Department of Public Works Commissioner Richard J. Grant and then-Department of Public Works supervisor Robert L. Moylan were conducting business as usual until they received an alarming weather update.
“You’ve got the big windows at City Hall. You look out the big windows. You don’t see the T&G sign (across the street at 20 Franklin St). It was all snow,” Mr. Donoghue said. “A public works official came in to tell Worth the latest bulletin, and Worth said, ‘We just got an update on the weather. It has turned bad, real bad.’ ”
With the agenda tabled for another day, there was just one more problem that needed to be addressed: How were the councilors going to get home? They weren’t going to make it in their cars, so they had only one choice: Hitch a ride in a DPW vehicle.
“I was (previously) the director of public works in Portland, Maine, so I was used to getting snow that was 24, 26, 28 and 32 inches,” Mr. Landers said last week. “Worcester got a big storm that was certainly over a foot, maybe 18 inches, about five days before the big blizzard. So our roads already had fairly big windrows from the plows. So we were already cleaning up into section from the storm five days before when the blizzard hit.”
And when the blizzard hit, Mr. Landers said, the DPW came out in full force and, for the next several days, never let up. By mid-afternoon Monday, 400 plows were trying to keep up with Worcester’s snow at a cost of $10,000 an hour.
“We were on a 24-hour schedule because we had to remove snow and open up the minor roads and streets that the plows couldn’t get to often enough to keep them open,” Mr. Landers said. “It was a long operation, around the clock for some number of days, one after another.”
After the blizzard was over and the streets were cleared, motorists and pedestrians had to deal with dangerous blind spots on the roadways caused by huge snowbanks that were there for a long time, Mr. Landers said.
The city faced a serious Catch-22 situation. The streets couldn’t be plowed because of all the stranded cars, while the cars couldn’t be moved because the streets weren’t plowed. For days, main roadways - including Gold Star Boulevard, Route 9 and Interstate 290 - were impassable.
“Biggest problem was people who didn’t get their cars off the road early enough and then got snowed in,” Mr. Landers continued. “And actually, in removing snow on some of these streets that were snowed in because we couldn’t get our plows into during the storm, we had to be careful you didn’t hit a car that was parked and covered with snow.”
“You see these humps on the side of the road. They were cars,” Mr. Donoghue added. “I remember we’re going down the streets and the driver (then DPW employee Patrick J. O’Rourke) said, ‘There’s a car there.’ I said, ’How do you know?” He said, ‘You see that thing that’s shiny? That’s an antenna.
That’s a car.’ ... The whole city was shut down for four days, and for four days it was so bad. They had to bring the National Guard in. It was unheard of.”
Lt. Col. Thomas P. Laurino was the commanding officer of the 1st Battalion, 181st Infantry, National Guard, during the blizzard. A month later, 209 National Guardsmen received the Massachusetts Emergency Service Ribbon for helping the city.
“The orders were to help out the people in the area who couldn’t get food, who couldn’t get to their homes or were sick and needed transportation to hospitals. We did a tremendous amount of it,” Mr. Laurino recalled last week. “The only reason I knew that everything had let up on the outside enough and we were not required to be there any longer is one of my people came to me and said, ’You know, Colonel, a woman called in and said, “You know that nice guy who picked me up the other day? Can you send him back here again today?″ I said, ‘I think everything’s OK now.’ ”
During their blizzard deployment in Worcester, the National Guard evacuated 95 residents from Park Hill Manor Nursing Home because of the threat of a collapsing roof.
“The first week was a horror show. We could barely get there,” Mr. Laurino said. “But everyone showed up and everyone did their job and everybody felt good about it when they were done.”
On Wednesday, Feb. 8, National Guardsmen discovered the body of Norman J. Cardin, 20, of Millbury, in his car, buried in snowdrifts on the West Main Street on-ramp of I-290 in Shrewsbury. The apparent cause of Mr. Cardin’s death was ruled carbon monoxide poisoning.
Mr. Cardin was not the only casualty directly related to the blizzard in Central Massachusetts.
Theodore LeDoux, 56, of Putnam, and Enos G. Kilman, 67, of Fitchburg both suffered fatal heart attacks while shoveling snow in front of their homes.
John P. Guilfoil, 61, of Ayer, was discovered in a snowdrift outside his office at 9 Norwich St., Worcester. Mr. Guilfoil, who was the state director of welfare services for Worcester, died of natural causes.
One of the most heartbreaking stories in Central Massachusetts in the aftermath of the blizzard was the body of 10-year-old Peter Gosselin, who had gone out to shovel snow on Feb. 7, 1978, and was discovered 20 days later buried in a snowdrift a few feet from his Uxbridge home.
“We were open. Then it became a state of emergency. And some of our waiters, we called in because we were very close with the hospital at that time and some of the doctors came in, so we started staying open for them. I made one of the waiters come in. ‘If you don’t come in, you’re fired.’ So we had to get him in a police cruiser,” Mr. Giordano said this week. “We were feeding the policemen next door. They’d come over. People abandoning their cars, they were trudging in. We were taking care of them, giving them free coffee.”
On the afternoon of Feb. 6, 1978, Mr. Giordano went on the radio to announce Maxwell-Silverman’s Toolhouse was open to any and all stranded at Lincoln Square or coming in off the expressway nearby.
Soon Mr. Giordano came to the realization that he was one of the stranded, and he and his hired help weren’t going anywhere for a few days. So he decided to make the best of it.
“It got late. No one’s going anywhere. So out comes the music because we were famous for dining and dance. The TV was there. The music was over there. The kitchen was in there. And my help could go cook whatever they wanted,” Mr. Giordano recalled. “They just joked around, stayed in touch with their parents, and the big thing was playing hide and go seek. And we played hide and go seek for three days. It was like a bunch of adults getting stuck in Chuck E. Cheese’s.”
Norton S. Remmer was the commissioner of the Department of Code Inspection for Worcester during the blizzard.
“The thing that sticks in my mind the most was getting from my house to the car with the city manager, the police and fire chief, just trying to get there before anything was shoveled and moved,” Mr. Remmer recalled this week. “The snow was up to my waist. There were massive amounts of snow but we were able to get to a lot of the roads and I think they cleared Coolidge Road (where Mr. Remmer lived at the time) to get me out of there, my side benefit.”
“The snow loads (the maximum in building code regulations) on roofs have gone up several times in this area,” Mr. Remmer said. “We were probably at something like 30 pounds per square foot, and now the base is 50 pounds per square foot, depending on what kind of environment that’s around you. If it’s hills or if it’s flat or if there’s nothing around you, the loads go up or go down. But it’s more accurate nowadays.”
Because of the blizzard, the roofs did cave in on a section of the main post office on East Central Street in Worcester, the George J. Meyer Manufacturing Co. in West Boylston and at the North Star Youth Forum in Westboro.
“For this area, I don’t recall anything quite that bad. Everything came to a standstill,” Mr. Remmer said. “It was really three or four days before things could get organized. There were masses of plows and backhoes taking the snow out and dumping it. Any open areas they could find, they would dump it.”
In a Feb. 22, 1978, article in the Worcester Telegram, then-Assistant Public Works Commissioner Richard J. Grant was quoted as saying 250 trucks and 35 front-end loaders had been working 16 hours a day since Feb. 10 to remove the snow. The city’s goal was to haul away one-third of the snow plowed or 300 curb miles. In the same article, Michael J. Burke, then engineer in the Traffic Department, calculated that the city hauled away 615.6 million pounds of snow after the blizzard.
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