The Blizzard of '78

January 25–27, 1978 · the whole town, indoors

The storm: The Great Blizzard of January 1978 — January 25 to 27, the worst blizzard on record for Indiana — is Mishawaka's largest winter event, and its record is the twin cities' shared record, stated as such. The National Weather Service's northern Indiana account gives the frame: snow falling one to two inches an hour at the height, sustained winds of 35 to 45 mph with higher gusts, visibility at or below a sixteenth of a mile; the storm's central pressure fell to record lows, and South Bend set its all-time recorded minimum pressure on January 26. The winter it crowned was, at the South Bend station, the coldest and snowiest on record since 1893: a winter snowfall of 136.3 inches, January alone bringing 86.1 inches, and a snow depth of 41 inches standing on January 30. The governor declared a snow emergency for the entire state on the morning of the 26th. Mishawaka has no separate station in this record; the figures are the area's official ones, and they are printed as the area's, not as the city's own measurements.

The town in it: What the storm looked like from inside Mishawaka survives in the Weather Service's own eyewitness file, which carries an account from a resident of New Road, "down from the place where the snow plows were parked": the snow so deep in the backyard that the dog could walk on the drifts and look into the house, the same wind piling eight-foot drifts in the backyard while it exposed grass in the front yard. That is the city's documented share of the blizzard at first hand — one household's measured memory, collected by the National Weather Service — and the entry prints it at exactly that size, against the station record's numbers. The blizzard's deeper civic course in Mishawaka — the closures, the emergency work, the digging out — stands in the Tribune and Mishawaka Times of January–February 1978, named here as the settling sources, not reached.

Sources:

1. National Weather Service, Northern Indiana (IWX), "Northern Indiana Blizzard of 1978" — the storm's course and rates, the record pressures, the South Bend station's winter of 1977–78 (136.3 inches; January 86.1 inches; snow depth 41 inches on January 30; all-time minimum pressure January 26), and the eyewitness account of "Peter W., formerly of Mishawaka, Indiana," New Road, the plows, and the eight-foot drifts, quoted.
2. National Weather Service, Indianapolis, "Blizzard of 1978" — the statewide frame: the first statewide blizzard warning, the governor's snow emergency of January 26, and the storm's Indiana toll.
3. Major Events section of the South Bend build — the blizzard at the county scale, its storm totals printed with their conflicts there.