Weather forecast

     For days the weather forecasters have been predicting a significant winter storm. The announcements said there would be a modest snowfall, followed by a lull, and then a possible record breaking storm. The modest snowfall arrived last night and now, 3:00pm Thursday, it is snowing again. L said when she lived in Baltimore a prediction of snow would prompt a run on grocery stores that would leave shelves empty. The Minneapolis paper today had an entire article, complete with pictures and evaluations, of different models of snow shovels. Being forewarned should be helpful.

    My grandmother’s delay may have saved my grandfather’s life. In 1855 Grandpa, Lars Negstad, with his wife, Grandma, Sigrid (Graven) Negstad, and their one year-old boy, Albert, my father, traveled to Brookings County, Dakota Territory. They traveled by wagon pulled by oxen trailing a milk cow. In their new home they lived in a small shack and took over an unfinished homestead they’d purchased. Lacking a well, Grandpa would herd his cattle to a large slough north west of the shack for water. It was his custom to do this after the noon meal, which they called dinner.

   On January 11, 1888 dinner was delayed. Perhaps Grandma was spinning wool. She made all of Dad’s clothes until he was confirmed. It was that delay that may have saved Grandpa’s life. Before the meal was finished the “Children's Blizzard, (so called because so many school children died) (see article below) struck. Had Grandpa been out with his cattle he may not have survived.

    That blizzard gave impetus to improving weather forecasting. The forecasting on which we rely today.

Takk for alt,

Al

On this date, January 11, 1888, an unseasonably warm current of air moved out of the Caribbean and surged north into the American Great Plains. It was the first in a series of events – a perfect storm that would create a blizzard that would change the face of American history forever.

Early the following morning, a dark cloud appeared on the horizon. The air grew still for a long, eerie moment and then the sky began to roar and a wall of ice dust blasted the prairie. Every house, barn, fence row, wagon and living thing was instantly covered with shattered crystals, blinding, suffocating, smothering and burying anything exposed to the wind. The cold front raced across the open landscape, freezing everything in its path.

It swept across Montana first, and then buried North Dakota around the time that farmers were doing their early morning chores. South Dakota was frozen as children were finishing their morning recess at school and in Nebraska, school clocks were nearing the time for dismissal. In three minutes, temperatures in every region dropped more than 18 degrees. As night fell, the temperature kept dropping steadily, hour after hour, deluged by the cold from the northwest. The cold front brought snow, ice and subzero temperatures – and it also brought death.

By the morning of Friday, January 13, hundreds of people lay dead on the Dakota and Nebraska prairie, many of them children who had fled – or been sent home from – country schools at the same time the wind shifted and the sky was exploding.

It was a disaster created by bad luck and bad timing. The January blizzard – which has become known as the “Children’s Blizzard” or the “Schoolhouse Blizzard” – affected an entire region and its population. There was not a family among the farmers, settlers and town-dwellers on the prairie who was not personally affected by death caused by the storm, or who at least knew another family that was. It was a terrifying event and after it passed, the region was never the same again.