In order to top the Eastern Shore deep freeze of 1976/77, you pretty much have have to go back to the winter George Washington and his men spent at Valley Forge. On its website nowadays, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency’s history of Maryland weather rates 1976/77 the “coldest winter on the East Coast since maybe the founding of the Republic.”
By Christmas Day, 1976, the ice had already started inching out from creeks and rivers and into the Bay. As you can see from the photo up top here, the expanse that ice soon covered reached proportions that seem unfathomable to many of us living on the Eastern Shore today. Some of the scenes in old photos have an almost magical quality of winter wonderland, don’t they?
In St. Michaels, the hardy Miles River yacht-racing crowd got busy with hastily planned ice races. In Chestertown, Ken Noble recalled for the Beautiful Swimmers blog of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum a day when he and a friend “skated from High Street to Quaker Neck Landing and back—about 13 miles down the river. We could very well have skated to Baltimore!”
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My brother and I walked across the bay from Gibson island to the Naval Academy. It was surreal. The next day, we drove our tractor onto the ice to clear it for an ice rink. At night, you could hear the ice creaking as the tide changed. I'll never forget that sound. And ships had to follow icebreakers to get to and from Baltimore. Piers and docs were sticking up in the air everywhere and any piers on the Bay were destroyed- didn't stand a chance to foot thick ice.
ReplyDeleteBut, the most memorable sight for me was seeing the "icebergs" that formed from the layering of ice broken up by the icebreaker. Some were 15 feet high!
I lived in Annapolis at the time and remember walking on the Bay too! Cars were driving on it and hundreds of people were walking out under the bridge.
ReplyDeleteOne of the many wonderful and picturesque views of our Bay Bridge!!
ReplyDeleteDown around Rumbley in Somerset County, the young men burned up their mothers' sewing machines to make sails for ice boating. Then Dickey Ford landed his airplane on the ice.
ReplyDeleteGood old Bob pinto as critical as you are of everyone else's grammar and punctuation are you sure you wanted to place a comma being County and did it need to be capitaized? Sounds like you guys down there in Somerset county should have thought a little longer if someone was dumb enough to land a plane on the ice. Makes more sense now knowing your a product of somerset county upbringing. The blood lines run mighty close down neck
DeleteAnd the oystermen drove their pickups onto the ice, cutting holes and tonging in order to earn money and feed their families!
ReplyDeleteThis back when we had a problem with climate change and suffering from catastrophic cold weather?
ReplyDeleteThis was during the early days of weather modification experiments.
ReplyDeleteLarge scale freezing temperatures can occur if the atmosphere is cooled too much using ice nucleation chemicals.
The aerosol program was in the early stages during 1976 so the techniques had not been perfected yet.
This is about the same time period in which Bejing China had over $1B in damages caused by the same problem, too much chemicals in the mix.
Live and learn.
The operations being conducted today are much better at distributing the ice nucleating chemicals and the ionosphere heaters can spread them out evenly throughout the upper atmosphere so the snowfall is more natural in appearance.
11:19 What kind of drugs are you smoking? Sounds like your holiday party started early!
ReplyDeleteThere are not enough chemicals on the planet to cause wide scale climate change like that!
1119 they must have really had the mix out of whack during the ice ages. I'm glad they've got it figured out a little better.
ReplyDelete@7:56, Your one to talk about someones upbringing. What the heck does, " . . . to place a comma being County" mean? Plus YOU capitalized county also.
ReplyDelete