The wind howled a hundred-mile gale atop the Empire State Building. Pedestrians, jack-knifed against the blast, slipped and fell on the snowy sidewalks. A woman, losing balance and blown against a stone buttress, went down with a fractured skull. Wind gusts swept a workman from a scaffolding, and he broke his neck. Falling signs injured seven. Accidents were so numerous that hospitals reserved ambulances for the more severe cases. An emergency squad of police roped several squares for safety, and the few passers-by clung to the ropes as if to life-lines.

Station WKY reported twenty-one interruptions to service between five and ten A.M. Williamsburg Bridge was closed to traffic while the sweepers cleared it. Pulaski Skyway was blocked for two hours.

In the harbor a freighter broke its moorings. A South American liner was held up in the lower bay, and docked four hours after announced time. A coast-guard cutter went out to rescue a fishing-boat. From fifty miles beyond Sandy Hook a tanker radioed: “Steering gear carried away; helpless in full gale; all ships close by please help.”

In Queens the power company reported ninety poles down and two thousand families without lights. In Bronx Park a freak twisting wind snapped hundreds of branches. Four elevated lines in Brooklyn suspended all traffic for forty minutes of the morning rush-hour, marooning thousands of passengers. LaGuardia Field cancelled all flights.

His Honor the Mayor whimsically stated to some reporters that he used to be able to enjoy snow-storms, but now he had to worry about what the cost of snow-clearance did to the budget. While His Honor happened to be looking from one of his office windows, the flag-pole in City Hall Park—fifth to stand there since the original liberty pole of the Revolution—snapped off and fell.

In the midst of disaster there was rejoicing. The Water Department announced gleefully that the heavy snowfall up-state would do much to make up a critical deficiency in the City’s reservoirs. Five hundred public-school children received a holiday because some heating equipment was disabled. Rena Carey, a declining Hollywood star, broke into all the picture sections with a photograph which showed her on a slippery sidewalk skidding into the arms of a tall policeman.

But at least there were no deaths from cold. The storm had moved from the southwest, bringing only gales and sticky snow. “This snow follows necessarily,” commented a learned writer of editorials, “from the fact that our ancestors chose to locate this city in a rather snowy part of the snowiest of all continents.”

3

And now a line of linked storms across North America blocked the outflow of polar air southward along that easy route in the lee of the Rocky Mountains. In China and across the Pacific also the storms drove hard against the North. So, along that broad ocean passageway between Norway and Iceland, the overflow of the Arctic poured out.