Big Blizzard

The sudden gale-driven snowstorm kept getting worse. Andy Archuleta could hardly see through the white swirl as he tried to keep his old Ford coupe on the drifted Wyoming road. When he was less than a mile from his home near Hillsdale (pop. 125), the car stalled for good. Andy used his head. He got out, dragged a fence post through the snow for fuel. Then he pulled off a hubcap, took it back inside .the car and lighted a little fire in it.

He huddled over it with his wife and five-year-old daughter. For hours, as the storm howled, they coughed with smoke and fed their flame. But gradually the numbing cold sapped their strength. As they sat snuggled together with their arms around each other, the fire went out. The wind blew fine snow through every crack in the car, heaped it tightly around them. Thus blanketed, they died.

The storm which killed them last week was one of the most severe blizzards in U.S. history. It invaded the U.S. from Canada, bellowed across the Dakotas, parts of Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas and Colorado almost without warning. It lasted for three days; temperatures dropped far below freezing (lowest: 11 below zero at Laramie, Wyo.), and the wind ran as high as 75 miles an hour.

Isolation. Neither highway nor railroad snowplows could cope with the storm; hard drifts formed behind them almost as soon as they had passed. Trains were halted, one after another. When the storm ended there were six passenger trains in the yards at Omaha, eight in Ogden, five at Salt Lake City, five at Cheyenne, six stalled between Sidney, Neb. and Cheyenne, Wyo.

Motorists and bus passengers were marooned in stores, juke joints, crossroads hamlets all over the storm area. Like the 343 who spent three days jammed in a tavern at tiny (pop. 4) Rockport, Colo, many went without beds and got short rations as supplies ran out. Fifty-eight stranded people at nearby Lone Tree fared better--drivers of two stalled Safeway trucks obligingly unloaded groceries and distributed them to the hungry.

In Colorado, soldiers from Camp Carson drove Army Weasels through the storm to bring out patients bound for hospitals. On the open range, the storm threatened thousands of cattle; they drifted in bunches, rumps to the wind, weakening steadily from lack of food.

To the Rescue. When the blizzard finally blew itself out, Army planes took off to drop supplies, scour the snow-burdened plains for signs of distress. Some spotted stranded motorists, who had survived miraculously far from towns. Some had been lucky enough to sit out the storm in their cars. One man and his wife who were marooned near Scottsbluff, Neb. had even found food--frozen ears of corn from roadside fields.

The frozen bodies of a rancher, his wife and their two children were found in a field near Rockport, Colo. They had left their car, had tried to cut across the prairie, a mile to their home. The rancher's body was huddled protectively over that of his son. His wife sheltered the body of their daughter. Both had wrapped part of their clothing around the children before they died.

At week's end the death toll stood at 22.

Cold air, moving in from the great blizzard, underran warm air in Arkansas and Louisiana and tripped off an eccentric series of tornadoes. The most damaging hit the mill town of Warren, Ark. (pop. 10,000) just at dinner time, sounding, said one survivor, "like a brand-new diesel train going full blast across Iowa."

It tore houses apart, roared through a big lumber mill, knocked down a high smokestack, ripped bricks from a new power plant and sent chunks of concrete, heavy beams, sheets of corrugated iron and great showers of boards flying through the air for hundreds of yards.

In the darkness, rain and hail which followed, emergency floodlights were set up. As ambulance sirens wailed, the people of Warren found awful things in the rubble--402 injured men, women & children, and the bodies of 53 dead.

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