The Great Blizzard of 1993 was snow joke

Like a lot of other people at the time, I didn’t believe. In my mind, winter was ending. Spring was already springing – buttercups were blooming, trees were blossoming. Snow? Ludicrous.

Also, at that time in my life, most all the snowfall I had experienced in northeast Alabama could be measured in inches, not feet. These lunatics on television were talking about a massive amount of snowfall and high winds resulting in snowdrifts. As a young man, living in Alabama, someone might as well have been speaking Greek. Snowdrift? What the heck was a snowdrift?

I remember closing the front door to the house early on the evening of March 12. It was a Friday. I scanned the sky. There may have been a little bit of snow falling by then. I looked at my car, a gold, two-door, 5-speed Toyota Celica, parked in the usual spot in the front yard, under a tall oak. “It’s not going to do anything,” I said. I locked up, turned in, and didn’t bother to look outside again until opening up that same front door the next morning to prove to myself that it had (in fact) “not done anything.” My Celica was gone. Oh, it hadn’t been stolen or anything. It was still there; I just couldn’t see it anymore because it was literally buried underneath the snow. Everywhere I looked, snow, snow, and more snow. Easily the most snow I have ever seen in northeast Alabama, either before or since. And those snowdrifts? Those were higher than my head. Way higher.

Many neighbors lost power. Thankfully, somehow, we did not. The television news told tales of how 12-18 inches of snow had fallen across central Alabama in the span of a single night. One of the highest snowfall totals was relatively nearby: 21 inches in Walnut Grove in Etowah County. Snowdrifts up to six feet tall in some areas. If such an event happened today, there would be countless pictures taken with cellphone cameras popping up all over social media. But in 1993, we were still beholden to traditional, film cameras. And most people were too busy just trying to survive to think about snapping pics. There are still plenty of photos out there, but I’m not sure they really do justice to the Blizzard of ’93. Widespread power outages, roads shutdown for over a week in some areas, more than a dozen deaths from exposure, at least $100 million in property damage – it was no joke. As one might expect from Alabama weather, however, temperatures climbed into the 60s just a few days later. As I write this, it is a few days prior to March 12. The weather has been sunny and unusually warm – early blooming trees and flowers are showing out. But today, there was a sudden dip in temperature and clouds began rolling in. Could history repeat itself? Never say never. But, as I also recall saying back in ’93: if I never laid eyes on snow again, it would still be too soon.

— Mark Harrison is a freelance contributor to The Times-Journal. Email: onthemark@columnist.com.