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by MARK POWELL
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South Carolinians are battling a potentially historic outburst of wintry weather. Though it seems awful at the moment, an earlier storm could have said, “hold my beer.” Because Winter’s Wrath ’26 has nothing on the Blizzard of ’73.
A lot was happening in the early winter of 1973. On January 20 of that year, Richard Nixon was sworn in for his second term as president following his 49-state landslide reelection the previous November. On January 22, the U.S. Supreme Court released its landmark decision effectively legalizing abortion in Roe vs Wade. A few hours later on that same day, former President Lyndon Johnson died suddenly of a heart attack (former president Harry S Truman had died just four weeks earlier). The Paris Peace Accords, officially ending the Vietnam War, were signed on January 27 (although the war itself wouldn’t conclude until April 1975).
And as February got underway, serious trouble had begun brewing in the Gulf of Mexico…
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A powerful low-pressure system began pulling warm, moist air northward, passing over unusually cold air that was hanging around the Deep South like loitering teenagers looking for trouble. The two collided, and Mother Nature took over from there. The system began moving to the northeast, bringing misery and mayhem in its wake.
It roared out of South Alabama as a rare Southern snowstorm, charging across Georgia with a ferocity unseen since William Tecumseh Sherman passed through the area more than a century earlier. In some places, snow was falling so fast that meteorologists couldn’t keep up with the accumulations using the metrics available at the time. The storm quickly acquired a simple, direct-to-the-point name: The Big Snow.
South Carolina’s turn came on February 9. That Friday began with early morning drizzle that soon turned into rain, then into snow. The white stuff began piling up rapidly, in some places an inch or two an hour.
As the storm slowed down, the snowfall didn’t let up. The system lingered, moseying across the Palmetto State in a lackadaisical manner on Saturday and even into Sunday. All the while, the flakes kept falling – making South Carolina resemble South Dakota (for a weekend, at least).
While most of the state was hit, nature provided an interesting twist. The Midlands and Pee Dee were especially clobbered, and even coastal areas had a rare blanket of white. Yet most of the Upstate got off easily, with only minimal accumulation.
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So, just how bad was it? Drifts as high as 8 feet were reported in some places. Remini, in Clarendon County, got 24 inches (two feet), making it the state’s greatest 24-hour snowfall record. Darlington had 18-plus inches. Ditto for Columbia and Florence.
I-95 was closed, stranding as many as 30,000 travelers. Some had to be rescued by helicopters.
The weight of all that snow caused some 200 buildings to collapse. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of awnings and carports were also ruined.
Then there was the human toll. At least 8 deaths were directly blamed on the storm (one being a child killed in a building collapse). Some estimates place the true number of fatalities even higher.
Road crews weren’t prepared for snow removal on a scale anywhere nearly that large – meaning streets and highways were closed for days; in some rural areas, the shutdown lasted a week or longer.
The system finally moved into North Carolina, eventually breaking up along the Atlantic coastline.
More than 50 winters have come and gone since then, though none ever came close to matching the Big Snow. More than half a century later, whenever someone bellyaches about bad weather at this time of year, it’s not uncommon to hear people of a certain age reply, “you think this is bad? Let me tell you about 1973…”
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR…
J. Mark Powell is an award-winning former TV journalist, government communications veteran, and a political consultant. He is also an author and an avid Civil War enthusiast. Got a tip or a story idea for Mark? Email him at mark@fitsnews.com.
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