 Editor's Note
02/06/98
By JOEL P. RAWSON
The snow drove sideways, filling the air so that when you
inhaled you sucked in snow, so that you couldn't face the wind, so that you couldn't
see 20 yards.
The heavy snow started on Monday about 1 p.m. By Tuesday evening it was over. In
about 24 hours 3 feet of snow fell on Providence, 4 feet on Woonsocket. Most of it
fell in the first 12 hours, at 3 inches an hour at the storm's most intense. We were
overwhelmed.
It was so much snow, so fast, that the roads just filled with it, and the cars stopped,
and the plows could not move and trucks could not roll. You do not think of it, but
every loaf of bread, every apple, every gallon of milk, every shelf in every store
is replenished from a truck. Every home's tank of heating oil is filled from a truck.
On the northbound side of Route 95 in Warwick, rows of trucks idled beside a snow-covered
but plowed lane. The diesel exhaust rose in the air and the drivers walked up and
down in the thin winter twilight. A little further north a bulldozer had cut through
the median divider and state troopers turned back the few cars, sending them south
again. The governor had closed the roads. North of the troopers, Route 95 was impassable
with snow.
In Providence, where 95 runs through a cut, the cars were nothing but white mounds
and the big trucks stood among them stranded, still, like the abandoned wreckage
of a battle. In the night it was more eerie than any episode of The X-Files.
While the snow flew we struggled to get inside to safety. When it stopped, we struggled
to open the roads to the stores, to the hospitals, to fuel depots, to get people
back to work. It took a week.
The Blizzard of '78 was an event that witnesses will never forget. We asked you for
your memories, and hundreds of readers responded. Their stories, featured in this
special section, are the stories of ordinary people caught in an extraordinary event.
They are stories we tell to this day.
This is mine. We lived on Jamestown. During the storm our family dog, Bandit, vanished.
After a week we gave him up for dead, perhaps hit by a plow or frozen in a snow bank.
When school reopened, my son Stephan thought to ask the school to announce his missing
dog on the PA system. That evening, as I shoveled around the garage, I looked up
to see a healthy Bandit walking up the driveway. It had been eight days since he
disappeared. I almost asked him where he'd been.
Joel P. Rawson was special features editor of the Providence Journal-Bulletin when the blizzard hit. He is now its executive editor.
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