Beth
Arlington, Massachusetts
I was a fifth year student at RISD that year and was working on finishing up my degree. I was living in Fox Point on Ives Street at the time. I had been hearing on the radio about the storm, but didn't think anything of it. A snow storm in New England is not a big deal, but I do remember the weather forecaster mentioning that two storms were combining into one and he thought it would be a big one. It started to snow as I was walking back from classes. By the time I got back home, normally a twenty minute walk that took two hours because of the worsening conditions, it was snowing like crazy and it didn't stop for two days.
There was so much snow that all you could see of the cars parked on the street were their antennas, everything else was completely buried. A neighbor's dog got lost in the storm and ended up staying with us for a week, until he could get back to his owner. We built a snow house in the back yard that was two stories tall. I had a set of cross country skis and explored the city. Took lots of pictures of 195 and 95 with all the stuck traffic. The payloaders the National Guard were using to clear out the city were big enough to comfortably fit ten people in them—the [buckets] were ten feet high. On the Brown campus, people built the most amazing snow sculptures, including a huge sphinx with the head of George Washington (I have a picture someplace in my house). Since school was canceled and the city came to a standstill for two weeks, we stayed home and played lots of bridge, baked bread when our bread ran out, and generally had a good time with some friends.
We were lucky. We had just gotten an oil delivery the day before, had just gone to the grocery store, and did not lose our electricity. One friend lost his car during the blizzard and never found it again. My car was in a parking lot around the corner and I didn't see it again until March. Finally after two weeks, the National Guard got to our street. They would plow out the street until they found a stuck car, they would then tow the car away, and then plow some more. That is why it took over two weeks to clear the snow from the streets. There was so much snow dumped into the Providence River from the bridge, that it flooded. All in all a very memorable event. I still have a ProJo book they published a couple of months later about the storm with lots of pictures.
Received via email, July 25, 2010.