20 years ago the Triangle got 20 inches of snow. Revisit that ‘once in forever’ storm.
The “once-in-forever snow,” as it was dubbed in the pages of The News & Observer at the time, started meekly enough this week 20 years ago.
Since it was to be the third blast of snow we had gotten in less than a week’s time (two separate events with about 3 inches of snow each time occurred earlier in the week), we were downright blasé about it.
This time, forecasters called for 1 to 3 inches in the Triangle. No big deal! We’ll eat a little more bread, drink a little more milk, have a few more snowball fights … we’ve got this.
A little snow came on Sunday, Jan. 23, 2000, but a drizzly Sunday evening lulled us into a sense of complacency. A false alarm?
But then on Monday, it snowed again. And it kept snowing. And snowing. And snowing.
By Monday night, Jan. 24, the Triangle had four inches of snow with double-digit accumulation expected overnight. CP&L (now Duke Energy) officials counted about 8,300 without power across central North Carolina, with many more outages expected.
By Tuesday morning, Jan. 25, the sneaky nor’easter had dumped more than 20 inches of snow at Raleigh-Durham Airport — the deepest amount recorded since measurements were first kept in the 1870s.
Neighborhood streets turned into sledding runs, with the grounds of Dorothea Dix Hospital (now Dix Park) and Pullen Park jam-packed with sledders and armies of snow ball flingers. The hungry trudged through the snow in search of open grocery stores.
One story in The N&O noted that by Wednesday, Jan. 26, some people (those with power) were so bored they “surfed the Net.” (Bored people did more than “surf the Net” during the storm. A story in The N&O in September 2000 noted a local baby boom with due dates for mid-October.)
Even forecasters were surprised
Schools across the Triangle were closed for two weeks. Two weeks.
What was this madness?!
Even the experts were taken by surprise. Ron Humble, a forecaster for the National Weather Service in Raleigh, told The N&O at the time that the snow storm was “the kind of thing you might see once in a lifetime.”
Twenty years later, Chris Hohmann, chief meteorologist for ABC11, a news partner of The News & Observer, echoes that evaluation. Hohmann said in a story on that station’s website this week that, “It could happen again one day, but it is very unlikely that we’ll see that in our lifetime,” Hohmann said.
Snow was falling at a rate of four inches per hour, Hohmann said.
“We don’t get snowfall rates here of four inches. Now that’s very rare, even in the mountainous areas in the Rocky Mountains to have four inches of snow an hour,” Hohmann said.
UPDATED, 9:20 a.m. Jan. 24: After our story ran, we heard from a reader who recalled a meteorologist on WLFL 22 (then a Fox station) who forecasted 20 inches of snow, but she couldn’t recall his name. Not long after, we received an email from former WLFL 22 meteorologist Steve Swienckowski, the one meteorologist in the area who called it (Swienckowski is now president of DCA Talent agency in Raleigh). With his permission, we have included his memory of the event below:
“I had to smile when I read your account of the 2000 20-inch snowfall.
That’s another few gray hairs for me!
I was Chief Meteorologist at Fox 22 at the time this is what I remember.
The night before, all of us (all local forecasters) were thinking 1-3 inches. At a few minutes before 10 p.m., the latest model run indicated 16.7 inches of liquid precipitation. Typically, we might multiply that number by 10 to get an estimate of snowfall.
I called my boss and briefed him saying “These numbers are crazy!” and he asked what was I going to predict. I said, “I don’t know!” and I hung up on him.
I went on the air with a paper hard copy of the numbers and waved it at the viewers. “If this is right, we’re going to get dumped on!” I went on to say that twenty inches was not out of the question IF all the precipitation was snow.
I watched Greg Fishel (WRAL) at 11 p.m. and he was still sticking with 1-3 inches, and I thought, “Did I just screw up?”
Needless to say, I did not sleep well that night.
The following day, the craziest of all possible outcomes came to light: we were dumped on.”
Power outages and rescues
It wasn’t all fun and games, though. Two deaths were attributed to the snow, hundreds of motorists were trapped on North Carolina highways and about 285,000 homes across the state — 12,000 in the Triangle alone — lost power for at least part of the storm and its aftermath.
A reporter quoted one man describing the scene along I-85 in Henderson as looking like “a white tornado” had torn down the highway, leaving jackknifed tractor-trailers all over the place.
NCDOT estimated at the time that it would cost $15 million to clean up the state’s roads.
Furball the guinea pig had to be rescued from his station as “class pet” from the shut-down Eno Valley Elementary School in Durham.
Life eventually went back to normal, with the Great Snow of 2000 becoming a distant memory for those who survived it. From now on, we would be snow experts, impervious to the perils of a few flakes here and there.
And then came January, 2005*.
*On January 19, 2005, less than an inch of snow and ice fell on Raleigh, causing historic traffic jams that paralyzed the city and made headlines across the country.
This story was originally published January 23, 2020 at 1:10 PM.
