The snow of 1996, 1947 and 1888 - 12 January 1996

On Boxing Day 1947 – whoops for listeners in Libya and my new friend in Bulgaria – I ought to say on the day after Christmas in 1947 I took up a new job with a paper, which began in the 19th century as the guardian of the minds and souls of Manchester, but in the 1950s decided to guard the opinions of the whole world.

Now way back there in 1947 with the Second War over, if one political reality was more obvious than another it was that the United States and the Soviet Union had emerged as the only two superpowers. Accordingly, the publishers of The Guardian decided that America was here to stay. Consequently, they took a deep breathe and instead of hiring eminent American journalists to send occasional despatches in their spare time, they thought there should be for the first time a full time American correspondent, I was it.

The date I took over from the distinguished part timers was Christmas Day 1947. The editor and I, understood that my first piece would be filed on Boxing Day a Friday and appear next morning, I was up early I can tell you, and I started as I always did in those days with the weather forecast – later it was with the obituaries – it said: "Cloudy with occasional snow ending this afternoon." I barely had time to read that cheerful sentence, then I thought I ought to go off round the corner to a stationary store and equip myself as a real writer should with a stack or choir of typing paper, yellow paper I preferred even then, in spite of a psychiatrist telling me that a fondness for the colour yellow, any yellow revealed the possibility of schizophrenia!

Since our apartment was inside the shell of a small apartment building, I didn't know what it was like outside. I did as soon as I hit the street where snow was flailing across your line of vision like flights of arrows. Apparently, it had started during the night and it went on and on. Now in those early days, we typed a piece we called "Western Union", they sent over a messenger, he went back and they transmitted it to Europe. On that Boxing Day they didn't, the boy couldn't get through, they would accept over the phone the shortest message, an apology if you like, which I did: "Blizzard story upcoming soonest, regret none today." By the evening, New York City had had dumped on it 26.4 inches of snow, a record since records were kept.

The previous generations had either known, or had to listen to, old men's stories of the appalling blizzard of 1888. Even when I first came to college here talking about '88 was a comical aspect of the very old, like today I suppose old men chunnering on about the 1940 blitz. It was only much later when I was reading a lot of American social history that I could begin to guess imaginatively at what was entailed in the horror part of it, hundreds of horses frozen dead between the shafts, the travellers on the famous elevated railroads stuck up there for days on ice bound tracks. The telegraph and telephone wires in all the eastern cities just a mesh, a tangle of thin icicles all over the streets of the towns. There were no buried power lines in those days. In all over 400 people lost their lives in what one old oldster called, "an era of paralysing anxiety".

Somewhere in a frayed bound copy of yellowing newspapers, I imagined my 1947 piece filed a day late. I'm glad I can't get at that file or the script of the talk I must have done because I described mostly the beauty of this great paralysed silent city. I was young and therefore callous and therefore didn't give much thought to the ordeal of the rural populations or of the city homeless or the thousands up in Harlem and other city slums with no heat, leaking roofs and walls and playful rats running through the floods in the bedrooms. We've seen lots of gruesome pictures of all that this time, and this time means last Sunday and Monday, looking out from the top floor of my apartment overlooking Central Park and the reservoir for many hours, we never saw a snow storm or any definable shape just a vast encompassing dense grey atmosphere. It could be as an old United Nations friend of mine said, teeth clenched on his pipe: "I shouldn't be surprised if we hadn't all had it."

Well this time not in 1947, we had lots of warning that a big one was on the way. Today we have satellites and we saw days ahead the approach of this storm from the deep South. From the South, we'll go into that in a minute. And the certainty of its running smash into the characteristic storm wind of this coast and north-east the weather bureau's prediction was alarming. Storms of four or five even 10 inches are normal and the cities of this north-east, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, every year put down in their budgets so many millions for snow removal, the cost of the giant trucks with their showering cow catches and the wages of the men who drive them – they hit a goldmine this time – not least every northern city and the cities across the whole northern tier of the Midwest, budget several million dollars for salt. New York City's budget estimate is for 200,000 tons of salt per winter. This week they've already used it up.

We were threatened with a possible record popping those 26.4 inches in 1947. We, and I do mean only we in the City of New York, got 20.1 – it was enough – but across the river there in the State of New Jersey, which lies in the direct path of a south-west storm and a north-east wind, New Jersey racked lots of records 30 inches here, 34 inches there. Now, to sense what that means once it's on the ground is to imagine that a wind, and there was a very stiff wind on Monday afternoon, will blow it into snowdrifts of six, eight, ten feet, and hundreds and hundreds and side streets in the five boroughs of New York City were impassable un-walkable, but if you could climb up the intersection hill they were ski able! And also, hundreds and hundreds of cars invisible except as sleeping polar bears.

By the way, for Monday evening when it stopped, and Tuesday and Wednesday, skiing was the best form of transport in Manhattan for one and a half days, right there in the middle of the Avenues, Park, 5th, Madison, Broadway, great white ski runs. All private cars had been banned by the mayor, so everything for comfortable wrapped up people was blissfully quiet, only an occasional police car and in the background, the reassuring low swishing of thunder of the snow ploughs

Which reminds me, you must have seen many of the pictures we saw, and I can hear people saying, well if it was so awful, why are those people walking and the kids scampering along the roadway, with snow only piled in ramparts on the kerb? Those pictures reflected the triumph for the city government of New York. Wherever you saw people walking it was on avenues on streets that had been ploughed continuously from the first hour of the storm till the last. The most amazing feat of competence to me is the fact that the three main airports here, Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark in arctic New Jersey were closed for no more than 36 hours. The first armoured division of snow ploughs go out from the first flake along the tarmacs at the airports night and day.

I realise I'm talking about all this from the very insular provincial if you like view of a New Yorker, I can imagine the faintly amused expression on the faces of the air controllers in say Rochester, Minnesota or Minneapolis who have about 150 inches of snow every year, massive storms continuously through the winter and who last time I checked with them had only once in history closed their airport for half a day. That boast means across half this continent that you've developed the technology for the conditions you are used too. Poor Washington DC not famous for snow had 16 inches, but they don't have New York's teams of snow ploughs and the same is true of cities far to the South, which brings us to the puzzle of why the storm came roaring up from the semi-tropical South?

It has incidentally nothing whatever to do with the hurricanes that are bred in the late summer in the Caribbean. Well it's a fundament switch in the path of the jet stream that's the villain. The jet stream is a very high altitude river of air surrounding the northern hemisphere and it flows east, its pathway is normally between the Arctic and the warm band of southern air. And for years and years the normal path of the jet stream in winter was in from the Pacific, east across north America over the far northern states, across the mountains, on across the prairie, whipping along the Midwest staying north eventually hitting the Appalachian Mountains in the east as snow, and blowing on still, east to west through New England and the neighbouring states of New York and New Jersey.

Two changes happened about seven, eight years ago, the air that lies over the northern polar region expanded, don't ask me why, and pushed the jet stream further south. The result is a new course for the jet stream and it's now much colder, packed with literally arctic air, it still stays north through the western states and the prairie, but it's been tending to dip suddenly down into the southern states of the east, it then swoops up again and heads for the middle Atlantic states and now batter north-east. Simply, the collision of arctic air with the normal warm air of the south is what caused all the trouble.

By the way, the meteorologists suspect that those old scoundrelly heat trapping gasses from our burning coal and oil, the fossil fuels' syndrome, also compounds the felony, but we won't go into that. I can only say for anyone inclined to call this blizzard a freak storm, that if the jet streams change of course is permanent then the blizzard of 1996 was a disaster not waiting to happen but bound to happen and it will happen again.

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