RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) — Thirty years ago, one of the greatest non-hurricane events saw impacts across the country.
The 1993 Superstorm, or ‘Storm of the Century” was one of the most impactful weather events to affect the eastern parts of the United States, with massive snows, bitter cold, pounding waves, severe storms and a record that might have slipped by the wayside here in Richmond.
It was also a major success for medium-range forecasts as it was correctly highlighted as a potentially serious storm four days ahead of time, on Monday, March 8. By Wednesday the ‘alarm bells’ were going off in weather offices all over the eastern part of the nation. The question at that point was not if there was going to be a big storm, but exactly where and on what time schedule.
The storm
The storm developed over the Gulf of Mexico near Texas on Friday, and by Saturday morning, had crossed into the southeast corner of Georgia. South of the system, the west coast of Florida near Tampa was hit by a storm surge that rivaled that of a hurricane. Near Miami, severe weather in the form of tornadoes took place.
From there, the storm took what may have been an unusual path for a system this intense, staying inland along the Interstate 95 corridor. For a system to be this powerful, you would expect the center to stay out over the ocean where it could continue to tap into the warm waters of the Gulf Stream.
Impact from the storm
That path of the storm led to a record — and basically saved our bacon — in Richmond from a devastating snowstorm by pulling warm air up over us and keeping the heavy snow tantalizingly just to the west of the area.
The Superstorm is best known for the piles of snow that it produced, and some of it in places that just don’t see it quite often.
Just about a foot of snow fell in Birmingham, AL. Chattanooga, Tennessee had 20” of snow and Mt. Leconte in the Smokey Mountains was the big winner with 5 feet of snow.
All through the Appalachians, heavy snow was recorded and with mid-March being a starting point for the hiking season, there were numerous rescues along the Appalachian Trail of hikers caught unaware by the storm.
Remember, back then cell phones were known as car phones, and the Internet was just getting started. You’ll remember it if you know of CompuServe, Prodigy and those AOL CDs that used to come in the mail.
Here in Richmond & Virginia
Meteorologists saw the storm on the way to our area, and that week was one of trying to figure out what kind of mess this was going to lead to in the area. By Thursday, March 11, you could see that the center of this storm was going to be coming just about over Richmond.
The intensity of the storm was forecasted to be such that it led meteorologists to ask the question: “What is the lowest atmospheric pressure ever recorded in Richmond?” As it turns out, we would set that record with this storm.
The storm as experienced by John Bernier
We started off with snow here in the area early in the morning. By right after 7 a.m. at my house in Woodlake, there were two claps of thunder and we changed over to rain for the next 12 hours. By the evening hours when the storm had passed to our north, we went back to snow and picked up 2” of snow in the overnight hours.
The storm made the roads very slick here but didn’t shut things down.
When you went to the west of us, all you had to do was make the 90-minute drive from downtown to the Blue Ridge Mountains and the snow piled up. We had a news crew out at Afton Mountain on I-64, and they saw 18” of snow pile up.
The big winter here in Virginia was Big Knob, just to the southeast of Front Royal where an incredible 40” of snow fell.
It was the southwestern part of the state that was the worst of the storm. Interstate 77 was closed down in the state, and all told over 4,000 people had to find shelter. There were also several building collapses in the Roanoke & Blacksburg areas, including a hockey area in Vinton.
Matt Dinardo experienced the storm from a different location
I was in my final semester of college at the State University of Albany. By this point, all of your forecast classes were done, and you were taking some high-level meteorology classes, such as Synoptic Level 2 meteorology, which was taught by Lance Bosart, who is often thought of as one of the leaders in research in meteorology for large scale and mesoscale forecasting and the accuracy of the models we use.
So, you can imagine the buzz when the MRF (Medium Range Forecast model) came out on the old dot matrix printer, which would print line by line and it displayed the potential of the massive storm along the east coast for the middle of March. Imagine 20 students and professors hanging over a printer as it came out and started to reveal the potential solution line by line. The “oohs and aahs,” the excitement, the joy.
Today’s world is vastly different. Meteorologists and weather enthusiasts alike, open up their browsers and go right to their favorite sites to view the 100s of models and their variations of them. Back in 1993, there were 3 models that we used, the NGM (Nested Grid Model) which went out to 48 hours. The LFM (Limited Fine Mesh model), which went out 60 hours, and the MRF, which was a 4-panel chart that showed the 60-hour, 72-hour, 84-hour and 96-hour forecast solutions on one page.
As a student at U-Albany, I was also an intern at WTEN-TV, the ABC affiliate in Albany, NY, learning from their chief meteorologist Steve Caporizzo. Television weather was still in its infancy. Sure, it had come a long way since Tex Antoine (ABC N.Y. weatherman) and improved greatly from Willard Scott (NBC weatherman) who used big magnets on a board to explain the weather, but we were just starting the age of computer-generated weather graphics and all of them were hand drawn and hand made.
Back then, if you wanted satellite or radar, you would connect with an old dial-up modem and watch those products come in line by line. Every television weather office, if they were serious about weather, had two printers. One printer would print the models on large dot matrix printers, much like we had at the weather center at U-Albany, and the second printer, also dot matrix, would print information off of the DDS (Domestic Data Service wire). These were your current observations, forecast discussions by the National Weather Service, watches, warnings, other model data and more. Pretty much anything that was not a map. These printers were printing 24 hours a day, seven days per week. Cartons of paper were used weekly.
By the middle of the week, not only were we certain that Albany was going to get this storm but that it was going to be one of the biggest storms for Albany, N.Y. as the track was going to be along the east coast and then up the Connecticut River Valley, which is the perfect track for lots of snow in Albany.
As the week went on, I remember reading in the forecast discussions from the National Weather Service forecast office in Albany, about coordinated conference calls with the surrounding local forecast offices and the “big boys” down in the DC area, the National Meteorological Center, where all of the maps and models were produced for the United States. The discussions were about the accuracy of the models, the flaws that were known in them, the high-level equations that were producing the solution of these storms, and, if I remember correctly, I believe that there were extra weather balloons sent up to get more data into these models to increase their accuracy. The end point of all this was, the Superstorm on the paper maps was absolutely correct and not to be taken lightly.
On Friday afternoon, Steve sat me down and said, “Matt we are planning on going all day and all night here tomorrow into Sunday and if you want to be here, I would be happy to have your help.”
At this point, I was 99.9% certain this was going to be my career path and I could not think of better on-the-job training than a major snowstorm, or by Friday afternoon, as it was then being called — the Blizzard of ’93.
I was up at 7 a.m. Saturday morning and went over to WTEN and started to work with Steve. Everything, based on the data coming in from those printers was on track. It was cloudy, it was already snowing from Philly and points south. We were hearing about tornadic weather in the deep south. The central pressure of this system was dropping rapidly — what you read or hear on TV now as Bomb Cyclone, which is the layman’s term for Rapidly Deepening East Coast Cyclogenesis, or what meteorologists call Bomb-o-genesis.
By 9 a.m. the snow started to fall in the Hudson Valley, working its way up to Albany and all points north. It didn’t take long for the light snow to become heavy, and I mean like pouring snow. Snowfall rates later that afternoon and evening reached 4” to 6” per hour as intense bands around this low moved up. Much like you get in a hurricane. The winds really increased during the afternoon and we were in the full Blizzard of 1993.
Every hour, at roughly five minutes after the hour, the weather observations came into the WTEN weather center, printed by those old dot matrix printers and the snowfall amounts were part of that report. I would quickly look them over and make a brand new map of Snowfall reports. Also, Steve had at that time, and still has to this day a network of “weather watchers” (possibly 100 to 200) who we could call at a moment’s notice and they would go outside and measure the snow. I was cranking maps on the weather graphics system and Steve was on the air every 15 minutes in the beginning for about 10 to 15 minutes and then it just transitioned to wall-to-wall coverage.
By the evening, the station decided to go to ABC programming with minimal interruption, since it was felt that most people were in their homes and not going on. So, it was at that point that Steve and I thought, ‘what is it like outside,’ because we were couped up in the weather office in the station all day. We went and unburied Steve’s truck from the snow and thought we would go get some food. But, obviously, everything was closed. Streets and roads were impassible. We made it out of the parking lot, about two-tenths of a mile down Northern Boulevard, where the station was located and were like, ‘what are we doing, this is stupid, everything is closed.’ So, we turned around and went back to the station for our dinner of cookies, cakes and soda.
Steve did hourly cut-ins through 1 a.m. and then the station had arranged for rooms at the hotel across the street. The plan was to be up at 7 a.m. and back at the station by 8 a.m. and on the air. But two meteorologists, witnessing the blizzard of the century, barely slept. I think we got up at 5 a.m. and we were at the station by 6 a.m.
It was incredible! The snow was so deep, it was still snowing but much lighter, you could tell that by Sunday morning, the system was wrapping up for Albany. By 9 a.m. to 10 a.m., the sunshine was breaking out and the snow was done, but the wind would keep up. By the end of the storm, Albany reported 28.68 inches of mercury, the fifth-lowest pressure on record. The storm dumped 26.6 inches at Albany, the second-greatest March snowstorm record and the second-greatest snowstorm on record. There were areas that picked up 30 to 40 inches of snow with locally higher amounts. It was absolutely incredible.
I left WTEN and made my way back to my student apartment in Albany, where I lived with one of my best friends, Paul Caiano, now the chief meteorologist at WNYT in Albany, and we compared notes on the storm, what we experienced, witnessed and truthfully what we were in awe of.
The Superstorm of 93, was one of the most researched storms for the next several decades and for those that witnessed it and lived through it, a storm we will never forget.
