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The forecast earlier this week called for only 3 inches of snow, but Michael Mignosa stocked extra milk, eggs, bread and other staples at his family’s grocery stores in Milton and Hingham.
“Any amount of snow, just that word in general, causes people to come out,” Mignosa, part owner of the Fruit Center Marketplaces, said.
It wasn’t always that way. There was a time when hardy New Englanders dismissed dire weather predictions and rode out storms with a flashlight and a few batteries. But that all changed in 1978 when a massive winter storm surprised forecasters and left the state paralyzed for a full week. Seaside homes were tossed off their foundations by 30-foot waves, power was knocked out as wind gusts approached 80 mph and streets disappeared under mountains of drifting snow. In Massachusetts alone, 73 people died and thousands more were forced to abandon their cars in the middle of highways because snow fell too fast for plows to keep up.
The South Shore has been buffeted by many storms since, a few of them even stronger by some measures, but 40 years later the Blizzard of '78 still stands alone in the memories of those who lived through it and even in the imaginations of generations born in the four decades since. It was a time of incredible devastation and desperation, but it was also a singular experience shared by thousands even as they were trapped for days with only their families and neighbors to turn to.
"You've got the TV that you were watching, but can't go to a movie, you can't go to a bowling alley, you can't even go to your neighbors' in the beginning," said Michael Goldman, who appeared frequently on television during the blizzard as the spokesman for the now-defunct Metropolitan District Commission. "You were trapped and all people had was their radios and their TV, so the communal experience of seeing the same pictures — the only thing I can think of that's close to it would be the Kennedy assassination."
For Goldman and others, it's clear that the blizzard left an indelible mark on the New England psyche, imbuing it with a tendency toward preparedness — some might say panic — that has become steeped in its culture and passed down to younger generations now taking the reins of government. Goldman says he sees it in his two daughters, both born a few years after the Blizzard of '78.
" 'Tradition' is the wrong word, but in Massachusetts it's something we all do," he said. "You may not know why you do it, but you do it."
Snow was expected on Monday, Feb. 6, 1978, but New England was unprepared for the severity and duration of the storm. A three-paragraph story on Page 4 of that day's Patriot Ledger warned of a storm that could bring 8 to 16 inches of snow Monday night before clearing out Tuesday. But the paper did not publish on Tuesday, the only time in its history it was unable to put out a paper because of weather.
Monday began as usual, with drivers heading to work in the morning on streets still narrowed by snow from a large storm two weeks earlier. But by that afternoon, new snow had started falling heavily and many took off early to try to get home before the roads got worse.
They were too late. With the storm intensifying, plows became stuck in traffic on untreated roads as drifting snow piled up around them. When traffic on Route 128 stopped altogether, some chose to tough it out in their cars while thousands of other abandoned their vehicles and sought shelter wherever they could find it — in hotels, churches and fraternal halls.
When the storm finally moved off two days later, photographs taken from a helicopter would show bumper-to-bumper cars trailing up 128, buried in snow to their windshields.
"We didn't know if people were in the car. We didn't know how to get them out of the cars," Goldman said. "You couldn't plow the roads because the cars were sitting in feet of snow."
Out on the coast, in Hull, Scituate and Marshfield, things were even worse. Thirty-foot waves pelted homes with cobblestones, ripped apart sea walls and turned the peninsula of Hull into a series of islands surrounded by icy seawater.
"The ocean and the bay literally met in four or five places in the town," said Nick Russo, a former Hull fire chief who was a young firefighter at the time of the blizzard and now works for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "It really presented a lot of trouble for us."
The few main roads in Hull that plows were able to clear at the start of the storm became canals of flood water as the tide came in and breached the sea wall. Firefighters trudged through icy water to rescue people stranded in flooded homes as buildings in several towns burned to the ground with firefighters unable to reach them.
At Scituate's Lighthouse Point, firefighters were trying to rescue several people on Jericho Road when an enormous wave broke over the sea wall and spun their boat around, sending several people into the icy flood waters. Two of them — Edward Hart and 5-year-old Amy Lanzikos — never made it back.
As Tuesday dawned, snow continued to fall unabated and waves again battered seaside neighborhoods as a second high tide approached. Most roads were empty except for the occasional rescue vehicle and Gov. Michael Dukakis took the then-unheard-of step of banning most drivers from the roads.
Meanwhile, many of the hundreds of people who were rescued or who sought shelter at schools, fire stations and the Coast Guard station in Hull became part of the rescue effort, cooking and doing whatever they could for firefighters and others coming and going on endless rescue missions. Hobbyists with CB radios became volunteer dispatchers, directing anyone with a snowmobile or a four-wheel-drive vehicle to deliver supplies to snowed-in neighborhoods or help get medical staff to hospitals.
With whole towns without power and no one else coming to help them, many neighbors turned to each other.
"It was street by street," said Russo, whose younger brother, Christopher Russo, is now Hull's fire chief. "Whoever had gas heat or a gas stove, that was the place where everyone congregated. They brought their families. They brought their blankets and their pillows."
It would be 36 hours before the snow finally stopped and the extent of the damage became clear. Whole sections of Hull and Scituate were abandoned and some coastal towns were closed to non-residents, with the National Guard checking IDs at the town line.
Trish Devine, now part-owner of Brant Rock Market in Marshfield, returned to the neighborhood after four or five days of sleeping at a town school and found cobblestones inside her family's house and piled up around her father's station wagon. There was no snow because the sea water had washed it away, but the esplanade at Brant Rock was littered with refrigerators and other appliances that had been washed out of nearby homes.
Away from the devastation on the coast, towns still buried in snow took on a holiday feel as the days wore on and most schools and workplaces remained closed. After days of being shut in, many took to the streets on skis and sleds, marveling at the volume of snow piled around them.
"It was like something they’d never experienced before," said Alan Earls, the author of two books about the storm, including one due to be published this year. "The whole region was a winter wonderland, and you were part of it."
It would be five days from the start of the storm before the Red Line in Quincy and Braintree started running again, and a week before mail delivery resumed and most schools opened. In the meantime, families and their neighbors were forced to make the most of their time together in an experience that was repeated all across New England.
Many storms have hit the South Shore in the four decades since, with some setting new records for snowfall and, just last month, high tide. But nothing has come close in terms of the 1978 blizzard's paralyzing effect, even as the region has become more densely populated and its roads more packed with cars.
That, according to those in the business of planning for disasters, is due in large part to advances in meteorological forecasting and a seismic shift in emergency management, which has since come into its own as a discipline.
"I think you could say it was invented in '78," said Goldman, the former spokesman for the Metropolitan District Commission.
All cities and towns in Massachusetts now have their own emergency management departments, many of which began as "civil defense" offices that before 1978 were concerned primarily with the threat of nuclear attack. These departments, which coordinate the work of various departments in the event of all kinds of disasters, now regularly train and plan for contingencies far beyond what their towns have experienced.
"If we can prevent it or keep it from escalating, that's a lot better than having to go in and mop up afterwards," said Weymouth Emergency Management Director John Mulveyhill, who got his start in the business in '78 using his CB radio to direct people with four-wheel-drive vehicles helping out with recovery efforts after the blizzard.
There's also a sense among emergency management officials that people today pay closer attention to weather forecasts, which have become significantly more reliable as computer modeling has advanced dramatically. People now are more willing to listen to state officials when they ask them to stay off the roads and let the plows do their jobs. Most drivers obeyed outright driving bans during storms in 2013 and 2015 and even last month, when Gov. Charlie Baker requested that drivers stay off the road during a storm.
"Most people did it, and that wasn't even a blockbuster storm,"said Christopher Besse, spokesman for the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency. "It was a moderate storm."
Emergency management officials say following driving bans is important because the region is now home to many more people and faces what many see as increasingly severe storms and rising sea levels.
Experts say there is little doubt that another Blizzard of '78 is in Massachusetts' future, but they promise it will be different next time.
"We’d know about it two weeks in advance," Goldman said. "That’s the difference."