We're going to venture a little bit off the beaten path for a second.
See, you might've noticed we've had history on the mind a lot lately. Naturally, we're excited about the Perelman School of Medicine's 250th year, and it's helping us put a lot of things into perspective we hadn't really considered before. So when this "crippling and potentially historic" (the National Weather Service's words, not ours) winter storm started cranking up, my mind pretty quickly ventured into historic context.
There's a phenomenon that developed — or at least gained widespread popularity — with the advent and success of Wikipedia, and it goes something like this: You visit a Wikipedia article for something innocuous, find yourself clicking related links, and wake up from your haze a few hours later on a totally unrelated Wikipedia article with no idea how you found your way there. Happens to all of us. And it's kind of how my mind works, for better or worse. One question leads to a whole new tangent, which leads to another question and another tangent.
So when I first started thinking about tonight's storm and historical context, the idea of just finding a list of the biggest storms of the past 250 years seemed kinda ... pedestrian. It's neat, but there's nothing of interest there beyond some big numbers. I wanted a story, not statistics.
That's when I decided I wanted to know more about what winter was like here, in Philadelphia, 250 years ago.
As you might imagine, it's not like cracking open a weather app and cycling back a few weeks. We're talking about two-and-a-half centuries, here, so "weather on the eights" wasn't really a concept yet. To some extent, that's disappointing — but, taken another way, it's fascinating. We don't have rigid statistics, we have something way, way better: the stories that were told by the people there to tell 'em.
Enter, Ben Gelber and The Pennsylvania Weather Book. I wanted to know what winter of 1765 was like here in Philly, and the Pennsylvania Weather Book had me covered:
"The winter of 1764-65 was widely judged to be 'the snowiest since 1748 and the coldest since 1741' (Ludlum 1966, 20) [...] The weather during the last week of January 1765 was intensely cold. Samuel Hazard, who collected notices on winters in the Delaware Valley from 1681 to 1800, wrote that the Delaware River was closed to navigation due to ice from December 24, 1764, until February 28, 1765 (Watson 1868, 356-357). On February 7, 1765, 'an ox was roasted whole on the river Delaware, which, from the novelty of the thing drew together a great number of people.'"
Wowza. Surely, tonight's storm is set to be a massive inconvenience and create monumental issues with ramifications I'm neither educated nor patient enough to list in their entirety, but we can at the very least say we're still going to be a step above shutting down the Delaware River and roasting oxen on it.
For the record, if you are going to roast oxen, you want your ox meat cooked to an internal temperature of 165°F to avoid foodborne illness.
Gelber went on to note that spring of 1765 brought with it a tremendous snowstorm that buried the area in around two to two-and-a-half feet of snow and "caused numerous shipwrecks from North Carolina to Maine (Ludlum 1966, 62)." He added, "Shortly after daybreak on March 24, 1765, the 'snow was near 3 feet deep.' Such snow depths have been witnessed in Pennsylvania only after great snowstorms in [1831, 1899, 1958, and 1996]."
Thankfully, the forecast indicates things won't get that bad. But when we consider how much of a pain it will be tomorrow to shovel out of whatever amounts we do get and make our way to wherever we need to be, having a historical context to fall back on can be nothing but a good thing. If there's one thing this 250th celebration has taught me thus far, it's that — whether you're talking about meteorology, ox roasting, or medicine — knowing where we've been is a fantastic way to appreciate just how far we've come.