Thursday, November 23rd, 1950.

100 million Americans east of the Mississippi River are sitting down to a turkey dinner on a Thanksgiving Day that is colder than most in memory, but otherwise not all that unusual.

Little do they know that in the skies above them are forming the perfect conditions for a winter storm of unparalleled intensity and oddity.

A storm that will go on to become the most expensive in American history, and change the way weather is forecasted from there on out.

It brought record amounts of ice, snow, wind, and rainfall and caused mayhem in every town it touched.

This is the story of the Great Appalachian Storm of 1950, and the series of unintended consequences that made it one of the most consequential of the 20th century.

I'm Noles.

I'm here to explore and explain.

November 1950 began with record heat across much of the United States.

Places as far apart as Georgia and Minnesota both experienced all time November monthly highs.

But just a few weeks later, an unseasonably strong Alberta Clipper or a cold air mass coming off the Canadian Rockies was born over western Canada and started moving south eastward.

And on Wednesday, November 22nd, it struck the Great Plains.

Minneapolis thermostats fell by 45 degrees in 19 hours in most of the upper Midwest the night before Thanksgiving dipped below zero.

The cold air mass continued to advance, and all time November lows were set in Indiana and Ohio.

In Steubenville, the temperature at midnight was 38 degrees, and at noon it was 14.

In Cincinnati, the coldest day of the year was November 25th, five degrees.

As that cold front continued its trek from Canada, temperatures plummeted by as much as 50 degrees in a single day.

New November lows were set in cities across the Deep South.

Nashville fell below zero and saw 7.2in of snow by the end of the month.

In Atlanta, the thermostat read three degrees and West Palm Beach was 36.

By the evening of the 23rd Thanksgiving Day, the low pressure system was covering basically the entire eastern third of the United States.

The extreme cold wasn't the only issue.

Across 26 states, there was also flooding, record snowfall and ice storm and hurricane force winds.

And we'll get to each of those in turn.

But first, I think we should examine what made this storm so dang powerful and full disclosure, I am not a meteorologist.

In fact, I'm an expert in absolutely nothing.

The Great Appalachian Storm of 1950 was a mid-latitude cyclone, which is a common storm type in North America.

These storms form between 30 and 60 degrees north latitude and develop from a stark difference between cold polar air masses and warm tropical ones.

Because these differences are the strongest in the winter.

These storms tend to hit in the winter.

Meanwhile, a tropical cyclone, which at its strongest is a hurricane, lacks that pressure gradient since all the air is warm, tropical cyclones just transfer hot water to the atmosphere and usually occur in late summer into fall.

Hurricane season.

The Great Appalachian Storm wasn't a hurricane or a tropical cyclone, but it did have a lot of these characteristics.

As you'll see later on.

Here's how weather in the eastern United States usually works.

Winds generally blow west to east, so storms almost always come in from the west.

Cold air comes down from the North Pole towards the equator and warm air vice versa.

The jet stream acts as the boundary between these two forces, and in the summer it usually sits over Canada, while in the winter it sits over the southern United States.

During Thanksgiving 1950, it formed an unusual U shape stretching from Canada down into Georgia and Alabama, allowing cold polar air into the Appalachians.

Usually, the jet stream travels at about 110mph, but this time it was blowing upwards of 200mph, providing further fuel for the storm.

That Alberta Clipper cold front coming in from Canada brought with it a low pressure system that intensified as it settled over Wisconsin on Wednesday, the 22nd.

At the same time, a block of high pressure was developing over Labrador.

During Thanksgiving Day, the low pressure system was moving toward North Carolina.

Low pressure basically acts as a vacuum drawing in wind and is usually associated with poor weather, whereas high pressure acts to push wind outward and usually is associated with pleasant weather.

So while all this low pressure tomfoolery was going on, that high pressure center in Canada wasn't budging.

Usually storms come across North America and blow into the ocean or follow the Gulf Stream along the coast.

And that's what weather forecasters expected to happen this time.

But because of that high pressure center, all escape routes for the storm were cut off and it stayed over the eastern third of the United States.

The extreme pressure gradient from those pressure systems rubbing up against one another, caused enormously strong winds and caused boatloads of precipitation to fall across the Mid-Atlantic.

The low pressure system over North Carolina and Virginia was a surface level low, but high.

Above the Ohio Valley, there was an upper level low pressure system which served to rapidly strengthen that surface level low.

These upper level pressure zones, which sit at about 15,000ft, are themselves influenced by the jet stream, which sits at about 35,000ft.

And just as upper level low strengthens surface level lows, so are surface level highs strengthened by upper level highs.

That high pressure system over Labrador went from 1030 millibars on Thanksgiving night to 1050 millibars on Friday night.

Caribou, Maine, saw its record November high pressure of 1042 millibars.

Meanwhile, the low pressure center had drifted northwards to Washington, D.C.. The cold front had reached the coast and there was a small warm front advancing westward across Pennsylvania.

The low pressure had fallen by 26 millibars in 24 hours, meeting the criteria for a bomb cyclone.

That high pressure center in Labrador was drifting south, sending out a warm front while its friction with the low pressure center was creating hurricane force winds in New England.

On Friday morning, a new low pressure center developed over Erie and drifted towards Cleveland, losing pressure along the way because low pressure centers spin counterclockwise.

The cold air from the south was being sent to the north and northeast, while the warm front coming across Ontario was being sent into Michigan and Indiana from the northeast.

This is completely backwards to how cold and warm air usually circulate throughout North America, but that's just how odd and unpredictable this storm was.

Warm front, by the way, is very relative, seeing as the entire state of Indiana stayed below 32 degrees on Friday.

Early Saturday morning, the pressure bottomed out at 978 millibars over Ohio.

Dayton set its record November low pressure at 983.7 millibars.

Less than 24 hours after Caribou, Maine, had set its record high.

The cold front was fully wrapped up in the low pressure system, making for an occluded front where cold caught up to warm.

The high pressure system moved back up towards Greenland, and the low pressure system moved westward as it weekend.

Indianapolis began Saturday with clear skies, and by the end of the day had seven inches of snow, which came from Ohio.

Cold temperatures persisted for the next week, but the storm had run its course and the worst was over for nearl Thanksgiving day, for much of the country, that year was already colder than average, with most temperatures being in the low 40s in much of the Midwest and Northeast.

A light rain began afternoon, which turned into a snow after the sun went down at midnight in Chicago.

The temperature was an even zero degrees.

Robert G. Nils, age 26, of Mundelein, Illinois, became the first death attributable to the storm when his car skidded and overturned.

An 83 year old woman died near Mankato and outside Toledo.

There were two pileups, one involving five cars, the other 11 as snow began to accumulate from west to east.

The effects for motorist ranged from mere inconvenience to skidding into oncoming trains.

There were two small personal airplane crashes one in Benton Harbor, Michigan, killed three, and one in Meadville, Pennsylvania, killed one.

A tugboat crew in the harbor outside Toledo had to be rescued by the Coast Guard.

All the men were safe, but there are $200,000 worth of cargo was lost to the lake.

A huge arc stretching from Buffalo down to Mississippi was covered in snow, but nowhere got it quite as heavily as the Ohio Valley, stretching from western Pennsylvania down to eastern Kentucky.

Pittsburgh received ten times its average November snowfall from just this storm alone.

Boulevard of the allies.

At the time, the city's major east west thoroughfare had to be salted four times between 7 a.m.

and noon on Friday, and US 40 and wheeling was plowed more than 20 times between 5 a.m.

Friday and 4 p.m.

Saturday.

And because the storm happened over Thanksgiving Day weekend, the effects were exacerbated by how many more people were on the road than usual.

Lots of traveling motorists tried to get rooms at hotels wherever they happened to be stranded, but many hotels were understaffed because their own staff couldn't get to work through the snow.

Once the hotels filled up, local churches, bars, farmhouses and civic organizations gave shelter to thousands.

The Pennsylvania Turnpike, which at the time was the only freeway in the modern sense, was closed for the first time in its decade long life.

The turnpike at that time ended at Irwin meeting.

Over 700 people from 32 states and Canada were stuck in Irwin until conditions improved.

Eight Boy Scouts were stranded in Virginia, and more than 54 people were stranded in Cleveland Area Metroparks.

Thankfully, all were rescued as the snow kept coming on Saturday, the 25th.

Most road crews were simply unable to keep up.

In Nicholas, Monroe and Grafton counties, West Virginia, literally every piece of snow clearing equipment failed and was soon buried in snow banks.

Police rescued more than 50 motorists stuck west of Sandusky, Ohio, and near Lexington.

The police commandeered a train and rescued more than 300 stranded drivers on the side of a nearby highway.

Drivers who didn't get stuck on the side of the road sometimes confused roads for railroads, leading to several close calls.

A man walking down the tracks was struck and killed in Erie.

The train didn't see him.

He didn't see the train, and nobody saw it happen.

That's how thick the blizzard was.

The trolley systems in Cleveland and Pittsburgh ground to a halt, leaving more than 150 streetcars sitting on the streets of Pittsburgh, making it all the harder for those drivers who actually couldn't get through.

The following day, the trolley stopped in Columbus and intercity bus service stopped, too.

In one case, a group of passengers got off the bus to help push it out of a snowdrift, and the bus took off without them, leaving them sitting on the side of the road.

The trains were still running, but they were up to nine hours delayed due to short staffing and the need to clear the tracks by hand.

But it's not like there were a lot of other options.

For instance, the Pittsburgh airport had closed at 1230 on Friday.

The National Guard was dispatched to Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania and Cleveland to Sherman.

Tank was used to pack snow down and make it drivable on the Eastern Shore Way and out in barrier.

A tank actually towed a bus eight miles to its destination, a task which took three hours.

By Sunday, the tanks and other National Guard vehicles were the only things moving in most cities, but people found other ways to get around.

A grocer in the Pittsburgh suburbs used a horse to deliver milk and bread.

One fireman in the Cleveland area walked 12 miles through knee deep snow to report for duty.

Saturday the 25th would have been the first day of the Christmas shopping season, but because no customers or employees showed up, the stores closed early on Saturday and stayed closed on Sunday, although being closed on Sunday was typical at that time.

The Cleveland Zoo actually managed to open on Saturday, but only four people showed up and the Pittsburgh Stock Exchange.

Yes, there used to be a Pittsburgh stock Exchange closed early on Saturday as well because nobody showed up to trade.

All five major department stores in downtown Pittsburgh were closed Monday and Tuesday.

Milk and eggs came to be in short supply as those on shelves went bad and those at farms couldn't be shipped out to replace them in time.

Black market tire chains were going for between 20 and $25.

The annual freshman football game between Pitt and Penn State was canceled, with less than three hours to go before kickoff on Friday.

The primary game that was supposed to take place that Saturday was postponed until December 2nd, and on that day, 7000 out of the anticipated 30,000 fans walked up to Forbes Field to watch Pitt lose 20 to 21.

In Columbus, the Michigan Ohio State game was delayed because the tarp froze to the field.

Workers could only remove it strip by strip, and eventually some of the 50,000 fans in attendance rushed down and pulled off pieces of the tarp for themselves to keep.

As souvenirs.

Cleats provided no traction.

Player's hands were too numb to actually play well, and no scoring took place after the half time when visibility dropped to zero.

Michigan was victorious 9 to 3, despite not completing a single forward pass or gaining a single first down, which is the only time that has ever happened in a college football game.

Ohio State's coach resigned less than two weeks later.

The roofs collapsed at two roller rinks, one in Blairsville, Pennsylvania, and one in Plum Ville, Pennsylvania, and the roof of a turkey Penn collapsed in center Township, Beaver County, killing more than 200 turkeys.

And just when they'd survived Thanksgiving, most Saturday weddings were, of course, postponed.

But there are a few stories of some very delayed ones being held in Butler.

The bride and groom, their parents and the minister all took horseback to get to the church and still arrived two hours late.

Only 20 of the 150 guests actually showed, although thankfully the caterer was among them.

In Wheeling, a wedding was postponed until Monday, but because conditions weren't much better then, most people still didn't show, including the best man.

The groom made it, however, after a grueling seven hour, 16 mile hike to the church.

This being the midst of the baby boom, there were more than a few babies who came into this world on snowdrifts that weekend.

Others came in farmhouses where their parents were stranded in one case in rural Ohio, and an ambulance took two hours to cover the requisite five miles, and the baby was born before it arrived.

And strangely enough, there are two different cases of young women being struck by appendicitis one in Pittsburgh and one in Dubois, who were picked up by strangers placed on sleds and taken to hospitals or waiting ambulances.

Hospitals soon became overcrowded, not only because of the increased injury rate, but because healthy patients were unable to leave.

And it doesn't end there.

The following week was anything but normal.

Though the snow had stopped falling in most places by Sunday evening, the sun came up on Monday morning to reveal every single road covered in 1 to 3ft of snow.

Colleges and schools canceled classes and many offices and stores and even Pittsburgh's gargantuan steel mills were closed for business.

In fact, over 250,000 industrial workers were idled in the city as the roads were cleared.

This resulted in production losses totaling more than $1 billion in today's money, as well as several million in lost wages.

The big three rubber factories in Akron were closed for several days, as was virtually every single coal mine in West Virginia because most were inaccessible.

The governor of Pennsylvania declared Monday to be a bank holiday in order to avoid runs on the bank.

But some in the northwest part of the state opened anyway.

Those in Pittsburgh remained closed, and because ATMs and credit cards hadn't been invented yet, many businesses and individuals ran out of cash, basically grinding the economy to a halt.

Monday the 27th was also the first of many dog days, or dig out days where in many cities and towns, local men and boys, some of them veterans from the recent war, formed volunteer cause to help dig out their communities.

Some places, like Pittsburgh, Butler and Wheeling, hired hundreds of extra men onto the city payroll to help with the effort.

But others, like Lima, Ohio, or Charleston, West Virginia, kindly ask that every Boy Scout show up to City Hall with a shovel.

In rural areas, the state supervised the clearing of the roads.

There were no true freeways yet, so Pennsylvania and Ohio had a much easier time keeping each other's traffic off the state line.

This, of course, led to intense traffic jams in border cities like East Liverpool and Youngstown.

The modern snowblower wasn't invented until 1952, so over the course of this week, dozens of men died of heart attack shoveling snow a number that unfortunately only increased as the storm went on.

And one steel worker in Pittsburgh was actually killed by a falling icicle up and down the length of the snow belt.

There were plenty of harrowing stories of rescue and survival.

Three announcers and two audio engineers were stranded at the WKJF Radio Tower near Pittsburgh for five days, where they stayed on air for the entire duration of the storm.

A family of seven got stuck in the Monongahela National Forest in 40in of snow until November 28th, when they were able to climb a fire tower and get the attention of the Rangers.

Their food rations were very low, but they were all apparently in good health.

One neighborhood of Charleston, West Virginia, did not yet have natural gas service, and after coal supplies ran out, people there resorted to burning any wood they could find, including their own chicken coops and outhouses.

On November 29th, in Greene County, Pennsylvania, five children were found alone inside a rural farmhouse with little food and no heat.

Their mother had been stuck in Washington, Pennsylvania, since the snow began.

The next day in Hocking County, Ohio, a family of nine was rescued from a rundown farmhouse half a mile from the nearest road.

The only food remaining was half a jar of jam.

Four year old Karen Johnson was almost drowned after she broke through the ice on the Allegheny River, but her four year old friend Linda Irwin, pulled her out and saved her life.

Similarly, 13 year old Powell Brumbaugh caught on fire in a chemical accident in Lexington, and his peers had the foresight to simply throw him in the nearest snowbank, saving his life.

Though it wasn't life or death, probably the thing that affected the urban areas the most from this storm and the snow was the traffic.

Remember, this was Thanksgiving Day weekend, so there were a lot more cars on the road than usual.

And after the roads began to be cleared, the biggest issues the cities faced was people simply abandoning their cars.

Cars in 1950 weren't as mechanically adept at handling snow, and the same goes for snow clearing equipment itself.

So your car was more likely to stall or slide again and again until you ended up in a snowbank, at which point it became an obstacle for other cars on the road, as well as snow clearing equipment.

As the snow piled up, stopping for a red light could cause your car to stall, so many drivers began simply running them.

Of course, creating plenty of hazards for every other driver on the road.

There were more than 10,000 abandoned cars on the streets of Cleveland alone, and it's not like tow trucks would be much help.

There are plenty of stories where they couldn't even get out of their garages.

By Wednesday, the number of abandoned vehicles in Cleveland was down to 4000, and the police began ticketing the remaining ones to encourage their owners to move them.

However, many owners realized they'd rather pay an $8 ticket than go through all the effort of clearing their car off and moving it off the snow covered street.

Many city governments encourage their residents to use mass transit, except, of course, the mass transit also got bogged down by the snow, and the capacity in many cases had been reduced over the decade prior as automobile ownership had skyrocketed.

Those busses and streetcars that did run were packed to the gills, and it wasn't much better for pedestrians as traffic snarled and red lights were not heeded.

There are stories in Cleveland of it taking half an hour just to get across an intersection.

Pittsburgh and Cleveland actually banned downtown parking, while Youngstown created a perimeter into which only essential traffic was allowed.

This, of course, created traffic jams all around the perimeter, to the point where essential traffic couldn't even get through.

On Thursday, Pittsburgh set up a similar perimeter manned by the 200 National Guardsmen who were still in the city, and it actually worked.

It stayed in place until Saturday, December 2nd, when the last of the National Guardsmen were sent home.

Saturday, however, actually saw the worst traffic jams in Pittsburgh and in many other cities.

Warmer weather and passable streets and major roads made it possible for many people and many rural people to actually get into the cities to do their shopping.

Remember, there were no malls or exurban shopping centers yet, so all shopping had to take place in the urban cores.

Shops had been closed for the last two weekends and at this point Christmas was only three weeks away.

More than 5000 abandoned car still sat on the streets of Pittsburgh, and garbage collection and mail delivery still weren't running at full capacity.

Some cities spent relatively little on storm cleanup, with Clarksburg spending an extremely punctilious $2,934.80 in larger metros.

The tab was monumental, with Youngstown spending 60,000 and Columbus spending 100,000.

Pittsburgh spent over 500,000, and the rest of Allegheny County spent 525,000.

This table represents cumulative snowfall from the 25th through the 28th.

Pittsburgh's total is still the most snow ever recorded there, while Parkersburg saw more snowfall from this storm than it had ever seen in an entire month.

Clarksburg, Erie and Franklin had additional snowfall after this date, though it is not considered part of this storm of Steubenville is eye catching.

44in 28.7 fell in just the first day.

Overall, West Virginia had the highest average snowfalls and the highest individual totals.

More than 40in of snow were reported in 11 of West Virginia's 55 counties.

So what happened to all that snow?

Well, a lot of it was piled in parks or fields or streams.

A lot of it was just left to melt on its own.

In Pittsburgh, they piled it at the Mount Wharf and pushed it right into the Monongahela River.

And as temperatures rose above 32 degrees, the potential for flooding in the Ohio River Valley thankfully never actually came to fruition, as many reservoirs were well below capacity thanks to a dry autumn.

There was limited flooding, however, such as along the Chagrin River in Ohio, at Pittsburgh's Point, and at Wheeling Island.

On December 4th.

This is still the number one ranked snowstorm on the Regional Snowfall Index in the Ohio Valley, as well as one of the top ten ranked snowstorms in the northeast.

Despite only covering three states, and I didn't have a good way to weave this into the story, but I couldn't not include the fact that in Cleveland, they plowed the snow so hard that it shot up and broke the windows of the door.

Apartment building on East 19th Street.

Okay, now enough with the snow.

In the mountains of central western Pennsylvania, namely Blair, Cambria and Clearfield counties.

Friday the 24th was much warmer than Thursday.

The 23rd, but very windy.

Warmer here, by the way, means that the high for the day in Altoona was 46 degrees.

Regardless, they were spared the snow that blanketed much of western Pennsylvania.

But that evening, a cold front moved in from the west and the temperature fell to 30 degrees in one hour.

Precipitation started around 7:30 p.m.. Warm air was still blowing in from the Atlantic, and was now forming a conveyor belt type system with the cold air from the west, which caused thunder and lightning even though the temperatures were below freezing.

If the upper atmosphere is producing snow and those snowflakes fall through a shallow layer of warm air enough to turn them into slush but not melt them, and then fall through a layer of freezing air above the surface.

That's what we call sleet.

Sleet can accumulate like snow or just kind of bounce off of surfaces.

If, however, that layer of freezing air above the ground isn't thick enough, the slush instantly freezes upon contact with any surface below 32 degrees.

That's called freezing rain, and it's way more dangerous.

And it's exactly what happened in these mountains.

On Friday, November 24th.

After midnight, the warm front overpowered the cold front and pushed back west, warming the ground enough to stop the ice, at least at higher elevations.

But Altoona, deep in the Logan Valley and Clearfield in its own river valley further north, remained below freezing and the ice stayed on the ground.

About one inch was falling every three hours until 10 a.m.

on Saturday the 25th.

At that point, the cold front reversed course again and changed the precipitation to a heavy, wet snow accumulating about an inch an hour.

The entire region then had between 2 and 4in of frozen rain on the ground, plus 6 to 10in of snow on top of that.

For reference, one inch of freezing rain is usually considered catastrophic.

The Clearfield Shade Tree Commission said that 90% of trees in Clearfield were damaged or destroyed.

The city government in Altoona said that every single tree in the city was damaged to some degree.

In more rural areas, they saw every single tree completely destroyed.

But the most noticeable effect in the urban areas was the destruction of the electrical grid.

Virtually every single high voltage transmission line was out of service, including all six of those that fed Altoona.

Two out of the four feeding Waynesville and two out of the three feeding Clearfield.

And the temperature stayed below freezing for days, hampering any restoration efforts.

Clearfield wouldn't come back online until December 1st, and parts of Altoona took much longer.

Workers in Clearfield got two transmission lines back up on Sunday, only for trees still covered in ice to fall back down on them on Monday.

Linemen would complete one section and have the section behind them get knocked out of service.

The generating station at the Pennsylvania Railroad Shops was used to power three hospitals, three bakeries and two dairies.

You know the essentials.

Luckily, most people still had heat since most homes were heated with natural gas and some with coal.

Most people used candles for light and some used old gas lamps.

So many power line workers were being brought in to help that they had to be housed in Pennsylvania Railroad sleeping cars and fed at the Jaffa Shrine.

Shriners cooked and served more than 6500 hot meals over a nine day period for the workers, restoring power to their city.

And the linemen didn't have it easy.

The ice wasn't melting, and so trees continued to fall from the weight of ice accumulating on their branches.

Finally, line workers tried an experiment.

They purposefully short circuited lines and used that heat generated to melt the ice.

It actually worked.

Finally, on Thursday the 30th, the temperatures reached 35 degrees.

Chunks of ice fell off the lines, but then it caused them to snap up and down with such force that it actually knocked them out of service again.

A decent portion of Altoona had electricity again on Friday, December 1st at precisely 6:25 p.m., when a 25,000 kilowatt line from Williamsport was re-energized.

But on December 7th, only 85% of the city had power restored.

The remaining 15% had to be completely rebuilt.

It had been so badly damaged.

Finally, on December 14th, three weeks after Thanksgiving, the restoration was considered complete.

Telephone service had, of course, also been knocked out, and in most cases was restored more quickly.

But in Morrison Cove, an area to the southeast of Altoona, the system had been so damaged that it was not completely restored until after Christmas.

School was out for an entire week, which the kids loved, but city officials put a sledding ban in place, which was not well received nor commonly heeded.

The ice storm caused the local governments, as well as the electric company, a great deal of money.

Penn Elects net revenues fell 8% between 1949 and 1950.

To help recoup costs, many local governments in the area instituted a per capita tax or a nominal flat rate on every person.

Clearfield Boroughs, for instance, was $5 a year.

And here's something that won't surprise you at all.

Many of those per capita taxes are still in place 75 years later.

While the Ohio Valley was filled with record snowfall, and the Logan and Clearfield Valleys were filled with record amounts of ice.

The valleys of the junior had a river, and the West Branch of the Susquehanna River were filled with floodwater.

Basically, the entire state of Pennsylvania got snow or rain.

In fact, everywhere that didn't record snowfall got at least two inches of rain, with most places recording 3 to 5in.

Tyrone had five feet of water and over $1 million in damages.

Borough officials there used 20 rowboats to bring stranded residents to the high school gym, where more than a thousand people spent the weekend, including the Penn State Marching Band, who got stuck there on their way home from Pittsburgh after beating Pitt 21 to 20.

I know I already mentioned that I just feel the need to rub it in.

Similarly, 2000 residents of Lewistown had to be evacuated.

Half the town of Renovo was temporarily homeless as their narrow river valley was beneath the water at Lock Haven, which was 78% underwater.

The West Branch rose 14ft in 12 hours, then another seven feet in the next 12, cresting at 6 a.m.

on Sunday, November 26th.

But that was still five feet below the level of the 1936 Saint Patrick's Day flood.

But that's a video for another time.

The day before the flooding, Lock Haven had seen 77 mile per hour wind gust, which ripped the roofs off some buildings and toppled trees down the river.

In Williamsport, a levee had been completed that summer, and so downtown remained dry.

The suburbs across the river, of course, were inundated.

In total, 48 river gauging stations along the West Branch reported flood stage conditions.

Thankfully, there was only one related death a hunter in Duncannon who became trapped in his car and was carried off with the flood.

It wasn't all contained in the West Branch, Saint Mary's, Bradford, Port Vale and Eldridge.

All were inundated with water.

There were smaller flash floods across Pennsylvania and in upstate New York, especially along Chester Creek, the Schuylkill and the Delaware, but none rivaled the destruction along the West Branch.

Rain caused rivers in Massachusetts to overflow, putting Lee and North Adams underwater.

Keene and Claremont, New Hampshire also relied on canoes and rowboats to get around.

At least until local newspaper editor John McClane Clark capsized and drowned.

Two hunters died in eastern Maine, where the rain persisted into the next week, and the ground could hold no more water.

Most locations in Maine received 6 to 12in of rain for the month of November, almost all of it falling after Thanksgiving and that just the flooding caused by rivers and rain all along the coast from Maryland up to Maine.

The wind was blowing at just the right angle to batter coastal towns, with storm surge of 20 to 40ft.

New Jersey ended up as one of the states with the highest death toll from this entire storm, due to just the storm surge alone.

Friday, the 24th was also a full moon, which only increased the intensity of the waves, especially in the Delaware Bay along the southern coast of new Jersey.

Due to its narrow inlet from the ocean.

In Thompson's Beach, new Jersey, a woman's cabin is reported to have floated four miles away and lodged itself in the beach without hardly a scratch to its structure or even its furnishings on the inside.

All the major roads and rail lines heading into Atlantic City were washed out, leaving thousands of tourists stranded.

It's one thing to watch your home get washed away or watch your community have to evacuate.

But imagine the psychological toll of being stranded in new Jersey.

In nearby Morgan Beach, 36 of the 38 houses were washed away, leaving over 200 people homeless in Long Branch, new Jersey.

A crowd had gathered to watch the storm surge battered the boardwalk.

A 25ft wave crashed into it, sending a 200ft section of the boardwalk flying into the air, scattering debris over the crowd and killing two of them instantly and wounding six.

In New York City, the Staten Island Ferry stopped operating for the first time ever, and the runways of LaGuardia were covered in 3 to 12ft of seawater.

The Matinicus Rock lighthouse off the coast of Maine, was nearly destroyed by the waves.

Waves broke into the glass panes 107ft above the ocean, damaging the machinery.

The seawater also got into the fresh water tanks, forcing the three man crew to survive off distilled water alone until they could be rescued four days later.

70 to 100% of the lobster traps in Maine were destroyed, causing over $1 million of damages to the industry.

Now, you might not think Ontario could receive storm surge, seeing as it's not on the ocean, but the wind was blowing at just the right angle to produce 30 to 40ft waves in Hamilton, leaving over 300 people homeless and 125 in the hospital.

The growing pressure gradient between the high pressure block in Labrador and the growing low pressure system coming up the coast, caused intense hurricane force winds everywhere between Washington, D.C.

and the maritime provinces, with the greatest concentration being in western New England.

This region of the country in 1950 was no stranger to hurricane force winds.

The Great New England Hurricane of 1938 had killed around 700 people here.

As we know, the storm of 1950 was a mid-latitude cyclone, but hurricane level damage was the only benchmark anyone had to compare the damage to.

Loss of life this time around was considerably lower, but in most places the damage was equal to or greater than that of the hurricane.

Connecticut, Western Massachusetts, and Vermont got the worst of the winds.

Hartford saw gusts of 100mph, and every single town in Connecticut suffered wind damage.

In Brandon, Vermont, the steeple of the church collapsed into the basement and in the farmland outside of town, more than 1000 cattle were crushed by collapsing barns or had to be put down due to their injuries.

67 towns in Vermont completely lost phone service in three days after the storm.

11 still didn't have it.

20 million board feet of lumber was destroyed in the Green Mountain National Forest.

The University of Vermont suffered $150,000 in damages, but more than 200 students formed a volunteer group to help clean up campus, as well as the rest of Burlington, Maine, New Hampshire, eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island also got high winds and flooding, but nowhere near as severe as other parts of the country.

The exception is Mount Washington, New Hampshire, which saw wind gusts of 160mph, but that was actually only as high as the meter went, so the real wind speed was probably much higher.

But it's Mount Washington, New Hampshire.

So what do you expect?

There are some very human stories that came out of New England as well, such as many babies being born by candlelight and one instance of firemen using manual power to keep a 13 year old boy's iron lung in operation until electricity could be restored to the hospital.

Buffalo, New York, is, of course, no stranger to winter storms, but it was actually spared by this one.

The temperature there remained in the low 50s throughout the week.

Things were much worse in central upstate New York, where winds gusted at 90mph in Syracuse and felled 10 to 15,000 trees in the region.

Millions of trees were felled in the Adirondacks.

15 people died in upstate New York.

One man was struck with a falling flagpole, another with a flying concrete block.

One was blown off a roof.

Another electrocuted by a live wire.

Most schools reopened by Tuesday the 28th, even though thousands were without power.

In New York City, the winds gusted at 94mph and partially collapsed.

A handful of buildings.

The New York Times reported that the city looked as if a giant Halloween prankster had been on a spree.

In it, store windows broke, buildings collapsed, trees toppled, cornices and roofs tore loose from buildings, and power lines snaked crazily through some streets.

To give you a perspective.

Just in the city alone, 407,000 customers were without power.

419 poles and 2464 wires were broken.

There were 1333 damaged signs and 3060 broken windows.

There were 2700 downed trees and 721 damaged cornices, and in some cases, chunks of those fell on people or on two cars.

In total, in the New York City metro region, 44 people lost their lives.

Further south, Allentown suffered wind gusts of up to 88mph and hurricane force damage such as roofs being ripped off, billboards toppling plate glass windows, exploding, objects flying through the air and crashing into people and houses and trees.

Breaking the Christmas tree in Harrisburg split in half, but remained standing only thanks to a guide wire and a wooden roller coaster in Tamaqua collapsed.

The last covered bridge across the Delaware River connecting Portland, Pennsylvania with Columbia, New Jersey, was severely damaged but was repaired, only to be completely destroyed five years later by Hurricane Diane.

The Scranton area suffered $250,000 worth of damages, mostly in broken trees, but also two bridges across the North Branch of the Susquehanna were washed away.

The first modern comprehensive homeowner's insurance, which features all kinds of different policies bundled together, had only been released in September 1950, and so most people didn't have it.

Everyone just had individual policies.

So if you had fire insurance, for instance, but your home was damaged by wind, well, then you were out of luck.

But even if you did have that wind damage insurance and your house was flooded by water that the wind had let in.

You were also out of luck.

Even then, most premiums were about $50 or $500 in today's money, so you'd probably end up still spending a lot out of pocket.

In the Deep South.

The cold front rolled in the day before Thanksgiving.

Now, the South does get cold in the winter, of course, but it bears repeating just how cold it was in 1950.

West Palm Beach was 36 degrees.

Tallahassee was 31.

Gainesville was 27 and Atlanta was 3.

Now, Thanksgiving Day itself for much of the South was actually pretty warm.

But that Friday, the 24th, a new cold front swept through from northeast to southwest, and it brought snow.

In Jackson, it was 75 on Thanksgiving and 22 by Friday morning.

Tupelo fell from 67 to 18 with three inches of snow.

Birmingham went from 70 to 20 with a November record one inch of snow.

Some record low temperatures from Saturday the 25th still stand as November temperature records to this day.

The coldest location of the entire storm was at the summit of Mount Mitchell in North Carolina.

-19 degrees.

As a result, many places across the South actually sold out of tire chains and antifreeze.

After a local weatherman bought antifreeze in Charleston, South Carolina, the store owner bought an ad in the paper that read, The weather man just bought antifreeze.

How about you?

In mountainous areas of North Carolina and Tennessee, the roads were impassable, even with chains.

Three people died in crashes in the mountains and in Savannah.

A man lost his life in a head on collision when the other car's radiator broke and sprayed water all over his windshield, which froze instantly.

Water and gas lines also froze to homes and businesses all over the south.

High winds pushed cold air into crawl spaces and other mechanical areas, which may have otherwise stayed warm enough, since this extreme cold meant that more people were using more fuel than usual.

And it was also the first time many of the heating systems were used for the season.

The thing that actually killed the most people across the South was fire.

Most of these fires were caused by stoves exploding, as only 22% of homes in the South at that time had central heating.

Many others were caused by people trying to thaw their pipes.

The Memphis Fire Department received over 100 calls from late Thursday through the end of Friday.

In Montgomery, a wooden prison building burnt down when the fire was first spotted.

It was small enough that it could be put out by a bucket of water, except nobody could get a bucket of water because the pipes were frozen.

There were fires at a few churches, a high school, a theater, a college dormitory, and the aforementioned prison.

But warehouses and department stores went up, too.

In Grafton, West Virginia, a dozer cut through a gas main, cutting off heat for 7800 people for 13 hours.

Unlike the Pitt Penn State game in Pittsburgh, they didn't even consider postponing the Kentucky Tennessee game in Knoxville, despite the fact that there were seven feet of snow on the ground, seven inches.

That's a big difference.

Instead, 80 workers spent the next seven hours clearing off more than 1000 wheelbarrow fulls of snow.

More than 50,000 fans still showed up to watch Kentucky lose 0 to 7.

Sunday was cold once again, but on Monday the 27th, temperatures began to rise.

This led to many burst pipes.

In Charleston, there were so many that the entire city's water pressure dropped to the point where the tobacco companies couldn't even operate.

Across the south, millions of acres of crops were killed, but so were many millions of pets, especially boll weevils in the cotton Belt.

And of course, some areas had it worse than others.

Around Augusta, Georgia, more than 80% of the vegetable crops were killed, as well as the majority of the grain, which was a $10 million loss.

Many schools stayed closed for the next week, not only because of snow, but because so many teachers just couldn't get back from their Thanksgiving travels.

There were many amazing stories of survival across the South, but perhaps none is quite so endearing as that of a mother and her young child who were trapped in their car on the Blue Ridge Parkway for 18 hours.

They survived only by burning little pieces of upholstery in a cigaret lighter.

They both did survive, except the mother was unable to walk for some time due to her frostbite.

The final two victims of the storm were brothers Johnny and Feral Fisher of Roanoke, West Virginia.

Four year old Johnny fell off a bridge into the raging West Fork River, and his 11 year old brother jumped in after him.

Neither were ever seen again.

This was a full ten days after the first victims had been killed in Illinois, and in the meantime, more than 300 people had lost their lives.

What I find really fascinating about this storm is the world of 1950 was so modern and yet so antiquated at the same time.

I mean, they had electricity and plenty of machines that relied on it.

They had automobiles spread far and wide.

They had college football games.

They were five years past the most destructive conflict in human history.

And we're currently fighting the Soviets in a proxy war in Korea.

The stakes of which were literally life and death for all mankind.

And yet the first commercial snowblower wouldn't be released for two more years.

Credit cards, ATMs and comprehensive homeowner's insurance were all in their infancy.

TV news stations weren't really a thing yet.

That's why I couldn't find any video clips to put in this video.

The best method that it had for mass communication was the radio.

Trolleys were getting stuck in snowdrifts, and many people who experienced this storm had the option to burn their outhouses for a wood and get around on horses.

Something else they didn't have in 1950 was modern weather forecasts with satellites and Doppler weather radar.

All these kind of readings coming in from ships and airplanes are something we take for granted nowadays.

But back then they didn't have them.

So remember those three things we mentioned at the beginning that made this storm particularly bad?

Extremely low pressure and extremely high blocking pressure center and an extremely powerful polar jet stream.

Well, the fourth thing that made this storm particularly powerful was the fact that there was basically no warning.

Meteorologists looked at what scant data they had and thought, it can't be that bad.

But the silver lining of the most destructive winter storm in United States history is that these days, we would be able to tell if it was coming, even if it wasn't really that bad.

And I'll give you the rundown in Princeton, new Jersey, where the wind gusted at 100mph and the power was knocked out for a few days.

Two meteorologists saw the perfect opportunity to test their theories of atmospheric dynamics.

Joel Charney, in his 1947 dissertation, had discovered mathematical equations that helped explain how storms formed, but they were too complex to solve by hand.

In 1945, the first computer, called Eniac, was invented.

It took up 1800 square feet, but it could perform in 30s calculations that would take humans 20 hours.

Now, it couldn't predict the weather of the future, but based on data that was fed to it, it could calculate theoretical outcomes.

Charney and his associates, Norm Phillips and John von Neumann, fed it the data from the storm and compared its theoretical outcomes with what actually had happened.

And if the computer was right, they knew their models were right.

The thinking was if computers could predict the storm, they could predict anything.

By 1952, they had a new, even more powerful computer that could complete in five minutes what had taken any act 24 hours.

As new computers and new models were developed.

The Great Appalachian Storm was used as a test case again and again.

That is to say that basically all modern meteorological models try saying that three times fast are based off of data created from this storm.

And these days, we'd know a few days out if this storm was coming and we'd actually believe it.

Because meteorology is much more trusted as a profession now than it was in 1950.

Thanks in no small part to this storm itself.

Besides modern weather forecasting, something I'm very thankful for this Thanksgiving is Super Storm 1950, a wonderful book by author David Call.

It just so happens to be the place I source most of the information from this video.

However, in many cases he gets way more granular in terms of the meteorology and the effects that it had.

So if you want to know more about this storm, I highly recommend finding this book wherever you can.

And now that I've told you everything I have to tell you, I want to ask you for what you remember about the storm.

Were you old enough to remember this storm?

Have your parents or your grandparents told you any of their memories from the storm?

Do you have any old pictures?

Anything like that?

Let me know in the comments down below.

I really enjoy that.

These videos have in most cases, become a two way street for sharing information.

I always read every comment and I love hearing what you have to say.

So with that being said, Happy Thanksgiving!

Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time.