The Great Appalachian Storm of November 1950
With devastating hurricanes battering the American coast every few years, I wanted to focus on a powerful Nor’easter today. It’s like an inland hurricane that causes blizzards. Every bit as scary as hurricanes, but also rarer.
Hello, and welcome to On This Date, Some Years Back. Today is November 25, 2017, and on this date, 67 years back, in 1950, the Great Appalachian Storm reached its most powerful and decimated a huge swath of the eastern United States and parts of Canada.
The storm was an extratropical cyclone, more commonly called a Nor’easter in the U.S. It lasted from November 24 to November 30. The effects were felt from the Gulf Coast through the Great Lakes region and eastward. There was coastal flooding from New Jersey northward. Record low temperatures were set in many states. Its extent covered 22 states in total, plus southeastern Canada.
New England and the Appalachian Mountains experienced blizzard conditions, with a maximum snowfall of 57”, and winds up to 160 mph (260 km/h). Over 1 million were left without electricity. (In 1950, the U.S. Population was about 153 million.) Toronto, Ontario experienced a record-setting 12 inches of snowfall.
In all the storm claimed 353 lives, and caused 160 injuries. It did $66.7 million dollars in damage. That value, adjusted for inflation, would be nearly $700 million in 2017 dollars. Insurance companies were forced to pay out more money in claims from this storm than any other storm in history. To date it is one of only 26 storms to be classified as a Category 5 on the Regional Snowfall Index.
And it was recent enough that we all probably know someone who lived through it, or heard stories about it firsthand.
Thanks for reading, and be sure to check back tomorrow for one of the reasons there isn’t peace in the Middle East.
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