The Blizzard of 1993 ranks as the second worst snowstorm to impact the Southeast, Ohio Valley, and the Northeast. And it is the costliest winter storm to date. It cost 5.5 billion dollars in 1993, and today it would cost approximately $9.8 Billion. This storm started in the Gulf of Mexico on March 11th and ended on the 14th.
Connie Berk remembers what it was like, “Well you went to bed it was nice out. You get up the next morning and you have about 2 feet of snow.”
There were many places that saw feet of snow and here is some of the most notable:
- 56 inches at Mount LeConte, Tennessee
- 50 inches at Mount Mitchell, North Carolina, where the drifts were up to 14 feet.
- 44 inches at Snowshoe, West Virginia
- 43 inches at Syracuse, New York
The most notable snowfall in Pennsylvania was in Latrobe, where there was 36 inches of snow and the snow drifts were up to 10 feet high!
In State College, businesses were dealing with nightmares. A Lowe’s that was a brand-new building was dealing with a collapsed roof. Meanwhile the students at Penn State were rejoicing because classes were cancelled. And roads throughout the area were shut down.
This amount of snowfall with this blizzard caused every major airport on the east coast to be shut down. Left 2.5 million people without power and caused 318 fatalities. Of those fatalities 49 of them were in Pennsylvania. This Blizzard canceled the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Scranton, but the parade in Pittsburgh went on as planned.
