Storm of The Century: The Blizzard of ’93

It was my 10th birthday. I live in Cartersville Georgia and we had 17 inches of snow.

my husbands band was playing in McDonough ga and on the first night there was no bad weather but they decided to stay and the next night they stayed in griffin ga and when they got up it was a blizzard and a tree fell on a car and they couldn’t get out plus the well ran on electricity and they had to melt snow for drinking water which had everyone came home when they were supposed to this would not have been a probable I had heat electricity food and booze they didn’t get home til Monday afternoon

I’m from a little town called Homosassa Florida I was just a kid when it hit us and it was at night the wind was just so scary we could hear that freight train sounds of tornado I remember me and my 3 brothers in the bathroom when we woke up and it was daytime and that’s when the water came my father was outside checking out everything when he heard the sound of trees snapping coming from down the street and saw it a 4 foot tidal surge heading toward us he came running back inside and we watched it almost come in to the house and at the time we lived and a house on stilts just a little higher than 4 feet above the ground and it came almost up to the door of the house

I started a new job at Cornell University 6 months prior to the blizzard. The University closed for, what I understand, the very first time ever. It was a very big deal!

I was 10 years old. We lived a half mile off of a dirt road in the North Carolina appalachian mountains. It was 2 weeks before the roads were cleared and 3 weeks before power was restored. Luckily we had a woodstove. My mother cooked up tons of soups on that stove and my dad buried a cooler in the snow to keep our fridge stuff cold. It was pioneer times and some of my best favorite memories were those few weeks.

I was teaching in Germany when I got called to TN to see my dying mother. The day after she died, my husband and one daughter were on their way from Germany and another daughter from Illinois. They all arrived safely, but that night at 2:00 am, it starting snowing. Our all-electric home shut down by morning, plus our well pump wouldn’t work. No water for toilets or anything else. Nothing to cook on, except a buck stove. We couldn’t get out of our garage either.
The next day, a neighbor with a Jeep took us to a motel owned by another neighbor who had saved us a room.
Nothing was open except a Waffle House close by. Finally they ran out of everything except waffles and syrup. We finally got to have my Mother’s funeral, but it took me literally twenty years to eat at a Waffle House!

I don’t remember this storm as well as I do the one from the following year in December ‘94/January ‘95. I was a senior in high school and we didn’t think we’d ever get to graduate. We got out of school in December for Christmas break in 1994 and didn’t step foot back into school until February 1995. We missed almost two months of school. We would think school would be ready to start and we’d get another pile of snow. We finally graduated in June of ‘95.

Being in East Tennessee for less than a year, we knew it was coming, but never in our wildest dreams expected anything like this! It was March, how bad could it be? My husband and I along with our 2 children were renting a house not far from where we were building our own in Riceville Tn. Just for fun, I snapped a picture of my husband standing next to a fence with the beautiful warm sun shining on his face and took another the next day, same place, standing in 3ft of snow. It began the night before, the howling wind was deafening. We were up all night listening to the trees and power lines break from the weight of the snow. McMinn County was paralyzed! No power for 7 days. Thank goodness for the fire place upstairs and the wood stove down in the basement, I cooked bacon and eggs, burgers, grilled cheese sandwiches and more on that stove. We will never forget The Storm of The Century!! I still have the T Shirt…. I Survived The Blizzard of 93!!
Thank you for this article.

During this blizzard my son who was 3 years old at the time, was experiencing appendicitis and we had to get him to the hospital. We had to dig our vehicle out first and the trip to the hospital that should have taken 15 mins took us over an hour to travel. Got him there and they took gm in for surgery

My brother Jake and sister Vanessa were all ski instructors at Beech Mtn Ski Resort. I remember the actual snow depth being over the rails of the deck. It was awesome. We got stuck at Sue’s house with some other ski instructors. We were lucky we did not loose power or cable. NCAA tournament was on.

When we surfaced from the house to the resort it was like a going back to Colorado where we were all born. Snow drifts above my Jeep and to the roof of the ski resort. Still have very fond memories.

We lived in Clifton, Va at the time and had a lot of snow. My family and my husband’s still lived in Knoxville. We saw pictures of the snowfall and saw the very cold temperatures. They had us beat by a lot! We also lived thru the freezing rain /ice storm of January 1972 in the Atlanta area. That was the worst I have been in……about 10 days with no power. We had the only fireplace in a new subdivision and had just moved there from Merritt Island, FL. All our neighbors, dogs, cats and birds spent about 8 days with us. We were all so very happy when the power came back on. This recent freezing rain storm in East Tennessee left us without power for 48 hours. The older we get the more difficult it seems to get. Thinking about a generator at this point. Which will probably mean we will never have another power outage. : )

My mom was 5 months pregnant with me during the Blizzard. From what she has told me there was snow up past her waist in South Central West Virginia.

I had just to moved to Birmingham, Alabama in August 1992, from Kentucky. I am a nurse, went to work that weekend, and was told I could not leave when work was finishe’d, and that I- 59 and I-65 were closed. I spent the weekend at University of Alabama Hospital where I worked, and didn’t get home to my husband and three young children until Monday morning! I stopped to buy bread and milk, and store shelves were almost empty! This was so different from life in Kentucky, where, in most storms, life went on as usual.

I vividly remember this storm and the week it took before the power was restored; some of my co-workers were four weeks waiting, or longer. It turned out to be a most bizarre seven days.

That night, as if thunder and lightening snowfall weren’t strange enough, the ground was lit with an eerie orange reflective glow. Although I lived in suburban Knoxville, the house was on the top of a hill and heavily wooded, and one of the few with a wood stove. Friends and neighbors drifted in and out all week; we had a host of folks cozily camped out in the living room and hallway. I remember gingerly tiptoeing around snoozing bodies during the night to refuel the fire, when the wood burned down and the returning chill seeped through the covers and woke me. And there was one afternoon when my housemate and I lugged a full drum of kerosene on a plastic sled up the hill from his stuck truck. I made new friends and relearned the art of conversation; ate some of the tastiest slow-simmered stew I’ve ever had; and took the absolutely coldest…and shortest…shower of my life! There was over a foot of drifting snow, and conditions were primitive and potentially dangerous, but somehow the experience seemed more like an adventure than an ordeal.

I also remember the Blizzard of ’93, and I remember that it happened just after Clinton became President (a moment of hope not unlike Obama’s first days). It was so unexpected, but I thought it happened in April because I remember that spring leaves had been on the trees. I didn’t remember it happening on a weekend, but that does explain my main memory, which is going out the next morning – I lived on 110th St. in Manhattan – awed by the purity of the snow. I was disoriented by how vastly it had changed the city landscape; all the parked cars had disappeared, and I couldn’t see the street around all these enormous, rounded humps of snow on both sides of the street. Kids and parents were playing and throwing snowballs in the middle of the street, having a blast. They were sliding down the enormous piles of snow from the top of the wall surrounding Central Park and even from the tops of the cars, using anything they could find to slide on, including black garbage bags- city kids don’t have sleds! I remember that on 110th St., a 2-way street, one lane got plowed out, leaving at least 10′ high drifts that further blocked in the cars, making the sledding even better by nightfall. The kids kept sledding under the streetlights on the gigantic, 20′-25′ drifts that were left by the plows on the corner of each block. They must have continued sledding on Monday, since I remember going to the subway- NYC traffic shuts down, but the subway keeps on going, and going… I was heading to work, but wishing I could be out with them. 20′ drifts- how awesome! Even sledding when I was a kid, when there was more snow more often, didn’t leave 20′ hills of snow at a 50° or 60° angle! Another great part was that the uptown, poor kids had the best access to the biggest hill in Central Park, just below 110th St. where _nobody_ went in those days except the drug dealers. The snow melted too rapidly, and within a few days, I remember the slush, dirt and ugliness, such a difference from the heaps of pure beauty that morning.