Belial Unbound

The snow came fluttering down, conveniently, on the weekend, the first real fall of the season in many areas. It ended four days later as one of the century's wickedest storms, a Belial of a blizzard that disrupted life for millions in the eastern third of the nation and caused at least 208 deaths.

In Washington, which clings fondly to the notion that it is a semitropical Southern city, and has little truck with snowplows and such, 12 in. of squashy snow, on top of 7 1/2 in. from the week before, immobilized the Government more effectively than SMERSH could have done. Most Government employees were given Monday off and allowed to come in late Tuesday. Congressional debate dropped to a somnolent whisper when only a ninth of the House and a third of the Senate battled through the drifts to Capitol Hill.

Snowed In & Snowed Out. It was not snowing in Viet Nam, so the State Department dispatched a four-wheel-drive Jeep to bring Dean Rusk in from his snowbound home in Maryland for the Sunday conferences that followed the U.S. decision to end the bombing pause. The Pentagon rolled out four-ton trucks for its top officials. One lower-grade officer had to stay on duty in the command center for 42 hours because his relief could not make his way in. Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman, after flying in from Minneapolis, found the 25-mile highway from outlying Dulles Airport impassable, finally "taxied" to National Airport, close to town, aboard a DC-6. A White House guard left home in Maryland at midnight on Sunday so that he could be on the job Monday morning.

The blizzard's main force hit central New York, the East's traditional "snow belt." Syracuse measured 53 in. of snow, Rochester 28.4. Oswego (pop. 23,000), a port city on Lake Ontario, was hit with 101.5 in. Huge, 30-ft. drifts blocked Oswego's main streets. In Syracuse, 40 office girls were trapped for more than two days in Mohawk Airlines offices. In Rochester, a nuptial dinner lasted for three days when wedding guests were snowed in at Temple Beth El.

The Jet Stream. The lethal edge of the storm was a savage 50-60 knot gale. In rural Maryland, gusts blew a rescue helicopter to the ground, killing the pilot, after an attempt to airlift an expectant mother to a hospital. (Mother and baby survived.) In central New York, two people were found dead in their car 300 ft. from the warm refuge of a house that they could not even see in the white glare.

A Weather Bureau meteorologist blamed the blizzard on an aberration in the jet stream, the 60-200 knot current that blows from west to east at a height of 30,000 to 40,000 ft. Normally, during the winter, the stream heads out to sea around the latitude of Philadelphia, serves as a buffer between arctic cold and warm, moist southern air. This year, as if answering an airlines commercial, the stream headed on down to Jacksonville before departing the U.S., and allowed the arctic air to freeze the moisture-laden southern front on its way north. The result was already being called the Blizzard of '66.

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