But if the editor was to hold the storm responsible for sixteen deaths, why not for hundreds? Many invalids died during the days of the storm, their deaths precipitated by chills and heart-depressions, attributable to the weather. Some healthy persons suffered wet feet which led to colds, pneumonia, and death within a few weeks. Other colds resulted in weakened resistance which opened the way to various fatal diseases.

Million-dollar rain, was another headline in the Register. This, doubtless, would be rated a good effect.

But the saving of a crop in California might quite possibly lead to bear raids in Chicago, foreclosures in Oklahoma, suicides in Florida, strikes in Massachusetts, and executions in Turkey.

As with the so-called bad, the so-called good was often far removed and difficult to appraise. Only a few entomologists realized that the rain, falling just when it did, destroyed billions of grasshopper eggs, and prevented a plague six months later.

Even aside from its cosmic effects the storm had thus vitally affected, in one way or another, the life of every human being in the region. It had accomplished all this without being itself catastrophic or even unusual.

2

The particular storm known as Maria to the Junior Meteorologist in San Francisco had rained, snowed, and blown chiefly upon California, secondarily upon the neighboring states. But there was in the nature of this storm nothing peculiar to that region alone.

Maria was dead. But on the eighth day of her life she had begun (after the strange manner of storms) to give birth to a new storm which the Junior Meteorologist had called Little Maria. Now four days old, no longer little, having swept the southeastern states, this storm centered over New York City.

In the Appalachians as in the Sierra Nevada, wires were down. The Peedee and the Santee, like the Sacramento, rolled flood-waters seaward. Snow-plows fought drifts in the Catskills as in the Siskiyous. Trains and buses ran late; planes were grounded.

In New York City the Department of Sanitation mobilized fifteen thousand men to clear snow from the streets. The Commissioner announced that mechanized equipment at work included 177 rotary brooms, 377 flushers and plows, 619 crosswalk plows, 46 sanders, and 1,246 trucks with plows attached; he added that he was ready to call out further reserves of men, and was making ready 268 additional pieces of equipment.

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.