WEATHER: Breakthrough

The sun had gone south, taking summer with it. Over the stiff and windless arctic, the constellations glittered like rhinestone gowns and the sheeted aurora flared in unbroken night.

From the polar empyrean, the cold crushed down with a brutality from which even the snow shrank. Day by day, the polar-air front bulged southward. Slowly, the low, languid mass of temperate air, the friend of man, fell back—back to the Great Bear and the Great Slave. There the invader paused, hunting a point of breakthrough. There the storm was cradled; while far south, in Buffalo and Birmingham, the people watched the sun of Capricorn go down like fire in smoke, and thought it pretty.

Then the big break came. In clear, dry, arctic fury, the spearhead of the polar northwester cut down across Alberta and Saskatchewan, sweeping over the Dakotas and the U.S. middle border, sweeping southeast toward Key West and the equatorial sea. There it collided with the moist, warm air of the South. An incipient little whorl of storm started up; it gathered power as it moved up the Atlantic coast.

Diversionary Attack. At the same time, another spearhead howled down over Nebraska, Kansas and Texas (see map). North of the border, it met in violent thunder and lightning a strong southern front surging up from Mexico. Thus a second storm was born. It roared up and across the U.S. to parallel the Atlantic storm, and peter out in lazy snow.

Blue Venus hugged the sun. Over 2,450,000 square miles of the U.S., the hot and cold oceans of air boiled turbulently. Snow fell on Alabama and almost everywhere else. In Florida and Georgia, temperatures dropped to 25° above zero. Warnings flashed to cities, farms and police headquarters east of the Rockies; trains & buses were delayed or stopped, planes were grounded. Butte, Montana creaked with 30 below (while in Sydney, Australia, eleven people died in 115° of heat).

The Target. In Buffalo, which is used to some of the worst winter weather in the U.S., Weatherman Bernard L. Wiggin watched a third column which had veered east across northern Illinois, Indiana and Ohio toward Lake Erie. He put out his forecast: snow squalls.

What Buffalo got was a blizzard—just about the worst storm in its history. It struck in a low, swift, hissing line of grey cloud that closed like night over the downtown district, the suburbs and the steaming rail yards.

The temperature fell 25° in two days. Street cars stalled, wires snapped, pedestrians jackknifed into the 30-mile-an-hour wind. In the rail yards, an embargo was called on all freight movements as drifts piled as high as a man's head (see BUSINESS). Only after five days could Buffalo dig out and compile its figures: 68 inches of drift snow in the suburbs; $126,000 for street-cleaning; eight dead.

In the nation 90 citizens had perished in the storm. But the wintry war was still on. Over the Mackenzie region of Canada, the source of continental storms, the temperature stood at 30° below. Hourly, the cold front pressed harder against the guardian south. A new breakthrough was coming. In buried outposts, the dogs felt it and whimpered for the Chinook.