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MAJ-8 DUG · THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE, NORTHERN INDIANA
The Great Blizzard of 1978 is Walkerton's winter benchmark, and it prints at the strength of the county's station record, because that is the record that exists. The National Weather Service's Northern Indiana office carries the storm whole: a cyclone whose central pressure fell to 956 millibars over Michigan by the morning of January 26; snow falling at one to two inches an hour; sustained winds of 35 to 45 miles an hour; visibility at a sixteenth of a mile or less. At South Bend, the county's station of record, the storm closed the snowiest, coldest winter on the books since 1893: the winter of 1977–78 averaged 19.7 degrees for December–February, the seasonal snowfall reached 136.3 inches, January 1978 alone brought 86.1 inches, the snowpack stood 41 inches deep on January 30, the storm's South Bend total is carried at 41 inches, and the station's all-time record low pressure — 28.82 inches, 976 millibars — fell on January 26, 1978. Governor Otis Bowen declared a statewide snow emergency that morning; the State Police treated every Indiana road as closed; schools in parts of Indiana stayed shut for up to three weeks. Walkerton's own texture for those days — the drifts on Roosevelt Road, the days the Glenn schools stood closed, the Independent-News' storm coverage — is not in any online record this section reached, and the residue stands named with the Independent-News' January–February 1978 run as its settler. The storm prints at county-station strength plus the statewide emergency: that is exactly as much of it as the record proves for this town, and it is a great deal.
Principal sources: National Weather Service, Northern Indiana office, Great Blizzard of 1978 retrospective (weather.gov/iwx), including the South Bend station records.