The Blizzard of 1978: the snowmobile's week

25 — 27 January 1978

The storm: The blizzard itself is told at full length in this record's Major Events, and only the snowmobile's part is told here. What arrived on Wednesday 25 January 1978 was the storm Indiana still measures winters against: the first statewide Blizzard Warning in Indiana history, snow at one to two inches an hour in winds gusting to fifty, Fort Wayne's barometer at the lowest pressure in the city's recorded history, roads across the region impassable for a week.

The work the machines did: In Fort Wayne, the record's contemporary anchor is a newsroom: the News-Sentinel published on Thursday and Friday of the storm with skeleton crews "who reached the office on snowmobiles — and the papers could not be delivered until the city dug out," as the Major Events entry records from the paper's own retrospective. The pattern was statewide, and the statewide accounts are explicit about the machine's role. Indiana Public Media's history of the storm records that "emergency personnel rode snowmobiles to deliver medicine and rescue people." The Encyclopedia of Indianapolis's account of the four days records that because standard emergency vehicles could not negotiate the snow-clogged roadways, "an array of trucks, snowplows, bulldozers, snowmobiles, and helicopters were called into service," that emergency personnel "rescued stranded motorists and ferried the ill and injured to hospitals," and that "snowmobile owners provided similar assistance," alongside citizens-band radio networks dispatching the runs. The National Weather Service's regional history generalizes the same picture across the Ohio Valley: thousands of volunteers with snowmobiles and four-wheel-drive vehicles "risked their lives to transport emergency personnel and utility workers and to deliver medical necessities to those in need."

The legacy: No source consulted ties an organized Fort Wayne snowmobile rescue unit to the storm — the documented rescues were the work of emergency services and of individual owners, which is how the record should leave them. But the storm is nonetheless the founding event of Allen County's organized snowmobiling: a year later, in Hoagland, the riders who had watched the machines prove themselves organized the Blizzard Blazers, named the club for the storm, and within another year had built the county a trail. The Heritage Trail's existence is, on the club's own account, a downstream consequence of the blizzard.

Sources:

1. This record, Major Events, "The Great Blizzard · January 1978" (the storm in full; the News-Sentinel's skeleton crews reaching the office on snowmobiles, from the paper's retrospective "Blizzard buried northern Indiana")
2. WTIU / Indiana Public Media, "WTIU's First News Broadcast was a Chilly Run-In with the Blizzard of ’78," 15 Apr 2019 (emergency personnel rode snowmobiles to deliver medicine and rescue people) — https://www.ipm.org/show/theinbox/2019-04-15/wtiu50-blizzard-1978
3. Cynthia J. Clendenon, "Blizzard of 1978," Encyclopedia of Indianapolis (2021) (snowmobiles among the vehicles called into service; snowmobile owners' assistance; CB-radio dispatch networks) — https://indyencyclopedia.org/blizzard-of-1978/
4. National Weather Service, Wilmington, Ohio, "The Great Blizzard of 1978" (volunteers with snowmobiles transporting personnel and delivering medical necessities across the region) — https://www.weather.gov/iln/19780126
5. Hoagland Blizzard Blazers Snowmobile Club, "About Us" (established 1979 after the great blizzard of ’78; the Heritage Trail born 1980) — http://www.hbbsc.org/about-us-1.html