|
|
|
|
Children's Blizzard 1
Mon Dec 06, 2004
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I’m Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook. A new book for the weather buff will be
released around the middle of December. It’s called "The Children’s Blizzard," and the
author’s name may be familiar to you: it's our own correspondent David Laskin.
DL: The Children’s Blizzard, or The Schoolchildren’s Blizzard, as it’s sometimes
known, hit on January 12, 1888. What happened meteorologically was: there was
extremely cold air up in the north, in Canada, and it just was kind of locked there and
stagnating for several weeks getting colder and colder. Meanwhile a low pressure
system came sailing in on the jet stream and it intensified in the lee of the Rocky
Mountains.
DL: What really made it explosive, however, was that there was a lot of warm and
humid air coming up from the Gulf of Mexico, and as we all know, that’s really a kind of
trigger for severe weather in that part of the country.
As Laskin says, within minutes the storm turned an unseasonably warm day into icy
fury that the European immigrants had never experienced.
DL: People on the ground really describe it as an explosion. The blizzard came as kind
of a wall of snow and ice that just slammed against the sides of buildings.
DL: The human cost of this storm was tremendous because it hit in the middle of a
school day; kids were at these one-room prairie schoolhouses, and many teachers
just dismissed class, and the kids just went out on the prairie and were blinded by the
whiteout conditions. Hundreds of people died in this storm, and many of them were
children… just a heartbreaking situation.
More on The Children’s Blizzard tomorrow. The Weather Notebook is funded by Subaru
of America and Lyndon State College, home to New England’s premiere meteorology
program. Find us online at www.weathernotebook.org.
Today's Links
Lyndon State College
http://www.lsc.vsc.edu
|
|
