THE WEATHER: No End

The U.S.'s bad winter rolled on. Windstorms battered the Pacific Northwest. A blizzard keened over the Rockies. At Toltec Gorge in the San Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado, as a Denver & Rio Grande Western passenger train wound through the night, an avalanche of snow hurtled down, picked the last three cars off their narrow-gauge track and carried them over the lip of the precipice. One car went down 30 feet, the other two some 400 (see cut). But all 14 occupants miraculously came out alive. Another snow avalanche, in Difficult Creek Canyon, near Aspen, Colo., killed Skier Alexander McFadden, socialite Memphis cotton manufacturer.

A tornado whipped through the center of Mississippi. In the single town of Newton (pop. 1,800), nine people were killed and 25 injured.

Most of the South and East had a brief respite from snow and cold. But with warmer temperatures came pounding rains, and with the rains came the year's first floods—which, like snow and cold, seemed likely to set many a new record. Towns were isolated, bridges washed out and highways blocked in Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

West Virginia's New River rose 30 feet above its normal level, swept scores of houses and other buildings into the Bluestone Dam basin. At Clarksburg, W.Va., the West Fork River rose to its highest stage since 1888. A 10-ft. levee collapsed at Crowder, Miss. The raging Duck River split the town of Columbia, Tenn. in half; Columbians were evacuated from their homes by the Red Cross and the National Guard.

By week's end, although nearly 10,000 people had been made temporarily homeless, most floodwaters were subsiding. But the bad winter was not over yet.