This weekend’s snow forecast brings to mind Raleigh’s ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ storm
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Forecasts for Jan 24–25 show 6–15 inches potential; models and apps still vary.
- Raleigh recalls Jan 2000 when a multi‑day storm dropped about 20 inches of snow.
- Monitor forecasts; models vary and a repeat of 2000’s 20 inches is improbable.
As Triangle snow lovers check this weekend’s weather forecast — multiple times a day — those who have been around here awhile are thinking about the last time the Raleigh area got significant snow. We’re talking significant snow.
Twenty-six years ago this month, almost to the day, Raleigh-Durham International Airport recorded more than 20 inches of snow over the course of a couple of days. In the pages of The News & Observer, it was dubbed a “once-in-a-lifetime snow” storm.
Could we be flirting with a second fling with snow destiny?
This weekend, Jan. 24-25, forecasts are calling for anything from “can’t say” to 6-15 inches snow (depending on your forecaster, with phone apps always among the most optimistic). If we rewind to late January 2000, Raleigh saw three blasts of snow in a week’s period; the first two events produced about 3 inches of snow each time, and the third storm was expected to be about the same. It was not.
Raleigh’s historic snow storm of 2000
We were seasoned snow birds by that third storm, not at all concerned when snow started falling that Sunday evening, Jan. 26. But then it started snowing again on Monday, Jan. 27, and it didn’t stop.
By Monday night, the Triangle had four inches of snow with double-digit accumulation expected overnight. By Tuesday morning, Jan. 28, the sneaky snow storm had dumped more than 20 inches total on us, the deepest amount of snow recorded at RDU since measurements were first kept in the 1870s.
It was a shock to everyone, including most Triangle meteorologists. In fact, only one weather guru called it correctly: Steve Swienckowski at Fox station WLFL 22 (before it was purchased by Capitol Broadcasting Co.). Swienckowski told viewers that Monday night that, “If this is right, we’re going to get dumped on!” and went on to say that twenty inches was not out of the question IF all the precipitation was snow.
We heard from Swienckowski when we wrote about the storm’s 20th anniversary in 2020, and he said after his 10 p.m. newscast, he watched Greg Fishel on WRAL and Fishel was sticking with the 1-3 inches forecast. Swienckowski thought, “Did I just screw up?”
He did not! He told us he didn’t sleep well that night, but by morning, he was vindicated.
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.”
Former ABC11 meteorologist Chris Hohmann told The N&O in January 2020, when reflecting on the anniversary, that snow was falling at a rate of 4 inches per hour.
“We don’t get snowfall rates here of 4 inches,” Hohmann said then. “Now that’s very rare, even in the mountainous areas in the Rocky Mountains to have 4 inches of snow an hour.”
“It could happen again one day,” Hohmann said, “but it is very unlikely that we’ll see that in our lifetime.”
What’s the impact of 20 inches of snow in Raleigh?
Twenty inches of snow isn’t a big deal to folks in places like Chicago or Buffalo. But in the South, it’s more than a big deal. Depending on who you ask, the 2000 snow was either the best or the worst thing that ever happened.
At first, most people were pretty giddy. Sledders took to any hill they could find — any pitching neighborhood street, the sloping grounds of Dorothea Dix Hospital (now Dix Park) and Pullen Park — sliding downward on garbage can lids, cafeteria trays, or occasionally, actual sleds. Many thousands of snowballs were flung. The unprepared bundled up and trudged on foot to the nearest open grocery or convenience store in search of supplies, not even daring to hope for bread and milk at that point.
Schools across the Triangle closed for two weeks. Two. Weeks.
These were the days long before remote learning — heck, The N&O noted in a story later that week that some bored people (if they had power) resorted to “surfing the Net.” The N&O reported in September 2000 that bored people without power did more than “surf the Net,” accounting for a baby boom of due dates in mid-October.
Not everyone had fun. Two deaths were attributed to the storm and hundreds of motorists were trapped on North Carolina highways. An N&O 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.
About 285,000 homes across the state were without power for at least part of the storm and its immediate aftermath, about 12,000 in the Triangle alone.
Furball the guinea pig had to be rescued from his station as “class pet” from the shut-down Eno Valley Elementary School in Durham, The N&O reported.
This time around, whatever the forecast may be, get your bread and milk early, and bring all the classroom guinea pigs home from school.
This story was originally published January 21, 2026 at 6:30 AM.
