The Blizzard of ’78, an intense, two-day nor’easter that at the height of its power pounded Worcester with an inch-and-a-half of snow an hour and raging winds up to 50 mph, occurred 40 years ago Tuesday.
Beginning shortly after noon on Monday, Feb. 6, 1978, and ending some 35 hours later, the blizzard dropped 20.2 inches of snow in Worcester, 24 inches in Oxford and 30 inches in Westboro, and left impassable roads, stranded motorists and 15- to 17-foot snowdrifts as high as the roofs of some houses.
Gov. Michael S. Dukakis declared “a state of total and continuing emergency” between Worcester and Boston, which essentially banned travel by all nonessential vehicles anywhere east of Worcester for three days.
The Worcester Area Chamber of Commerce estimated the storm cost the area about $40 million for snow removal and time lost to businesses. The statewide estimate for snow removal alone topped $400 million.
Worcester schools were closed for three weeks, including the scheduled one-week February vacation.
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.