There s snowfall and there are winter storms. Then there are blizzards of the century when it snows so hard it snows sideways.

These are the times nature unleashes such a furious mix of snow, cold, and wind that it becomes a benchmark by which every future blizzard gets measured.

Such was the Blizzard of 1978, the most powerful winter storm to hit Ohio in the 20th century.

It struck parts of the Midwest and the Ohio Valley 30 years ago this weekend, hammering northwest Ohio with 13 inches of snow, wind gusts that topped 50 mph, and subzero wind chill temperatures.

In Toledo, the barometric pressure plunged to a record 28.48 in the early morning of Jan. 26 as the entire region got whited-out overnight.

Life came to a standstill.

Snow drifts up to 16 feet consumed mobile homes and piled as high as two-story houses. Roads and highways became littered with buried cars. Entire towns and villages were forced to close, as were interstates and the Ohio Turnpike. President Jimmy Carter declared a state of emergency in Ohio.

Motorists were prohibited from the roads, which were physically impassable anyway to most vehicles. Snowmobiles, normally banned from city streets as a nuisance, became crucial for the rescue of stranded motorists and for ferrying food and supplies.

It s funny how the devil suddenly becomes an angel, said William T. O Connor, a retired Toledo Fire Department captain who worked in communications during the blizzard.]

The storm also proved deadly.

Caught in stalled cars or unheated homes, men and women froze to death. Sixty-one people died in Ohio as a result of the storm, including nearly a dozen in northwest Ohio and more than 20 in Michigan.

Three decades later, the 1978 blizzard s legacy can still provoke flurries around the milk and bread aisles of local grocery stores whenever rowdy weather looms.

It has proven an unforgettable event for those who lived through it, many of whom emerged from the winter tempest with electrifying tales of survival.

Shutting things down

The impact that this winter storm had on our area could be compared to [Hurricane] Katrina it basically shut the whole area down said Kirk Lombardy, who is a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Cleveland. Nothing has ever come close to that one in Ohio.

The day before the storm, Jan. 25, a Wednesday, had a typical winter high of 33 degrees, snowfall of 1.8 inches, and rain.

Overhead loomed two low-pressure systems one from North Dakota and the other from the Gulf of Mexico. At first, forecasters said they would miss one another. Then they veered off their predicted courses, and at about midnight, the systems collided.

Soon temperatures plummeted and rain crystallized into blankets of snow. Winds began to lash and howl, stirring snow already on the ground from that year s hard winter.

By 4 a.m., northwest Ohio was at the mercy of what meteorologists labeled a rare severe blizzard.

I really was caught off guard. The day before it was lightning and thundering, and by evening it began to start snowing, said Ray Burkholder, 90, a longtime National Weather Service observer in Pandora, Ohio, who recalled being awakened early on Jan. 26 by phone calls inquiring about the low barometric pressure.

The afternoon of the blizzard you couldn t see more than 10 feet ahead of you.

Later that first day, Mr. Burkholder and his son battled the driving snow to drive a farm tractor to a woods a half mile south of Pandora, where Mr. Burkholder pulled out his snow-measuring stick. He measured 21 inches of snow on the ground 11 from the blizzard overtop a layer of ice, then another 10 inches of snow from before the blizzard.

The following day, Jan. 27, it snowed another 2 inches, bringing the total on the ground during the blizzard to 23 inches, Mr. Burkholder said.

The blizzard snow eventually propelled the winter of 1977-78 to Toledo s snowiest in a century, with a total 73.1 inches, or about twice the average total.

Stuck inside

The first day everybody was stuck inside, recalled George Hayes, 60, police chief of Elmore, Ohio, who during the blizzard was a volunteer firefighter in Rocky Ridge, about 20 miles east of Toledo.

By the second day, the only vehicles that could get around the village were snowmobiles, of which Mr. Hayes owned two. As residents ran low on food and fuel, Mr. Hayes and other firefighters rode their snowmobiles four miles to a carry-out in nearby Graytown.

Mr. Hayes recalled how he used bungee cords to strap milk crates to the back of his snowmobile, and then returned to Rocky Ridge and dropped off the milk at the only store in town, where the shelves were bare.

Once you left the village you couldn t travel on any roads. You had to travel cross-country because the drifts were so high, Mr. Hayes said.

Fortunately for Rocky Ridge, a few members of the fire department worked at a limestone quarry about 1 miles away and knew how to use the machinery.

They brought one big front loader out, dug their way back to Rocky Ridge, and then they dug the town out, Mr. Hayes recalled.

Pressing forward

With residents snowbound, many area restaurants and businesses remained closed for days after the blizzard hit.

But not every operation could just wait it out.

Toledo police began 12-hour shifts and got around town in four-wheel-drive vehicles owned and operated by the Ohio National Guard. Doctors and nurses spent the night at their hospitals, which coordinated snowmobile rides for them to and from work.

Beverly Hartson of Wauseon knew something was awry when she awakened in Toledo s former Parkview Hospital the morning of Jan. 26 to see the same nurse who had put her to bed.

The nurse was wearing scrubs rather than the standard gown and white cap after her unplanned sleepover.

She told me, I doubt if you re going to be able to go home, recalled Mrs. Hartson, who three days before had given birth to her first child, Chad.

With her husband, friends, and family all snowed in, Mrs. Hartson, then 26, spent the next two days as the only patient in the maternity ward. Yet hospital staff was still worried about running low on food, she said.

I recall them telling me not to order big portions. And after having a baby, that s the thing you want to do eat, Mrs. Hartson said.

When she was finally able to leave the hospital Jan. 28, nurses swaddled young Chad in blankets and packed the family s pickup truck with enough formula, diapers, and baby powder for weeks, just in case we got stranded, Mrs. Hartson said.

Then came the most harrowing drive of her life.

We didn t see any cars, but we saw four-by-four trucks and a lot of snowmobiles, said Mrs. Hartson, whose original due date was Jan. 26 the day the blizzard hit. I was three days early. I think my higher power knew what was going on.

Pregnant and stranded

Sue Kotz was more than 8 months pregnant when she and her husband, Mike Kotz, awakened the morning the blizzard hit to find themselves snowbound in an old drafty farmhouse that they rented along Willow Road in Weston, Ohio, about 30 miles south of Toledo in Wood County.

Aside from baked beans, orange soda pop, and a handful of crackers, their cupboards were bare. Soon the house lost electricity and heat, and all they could do to keep warm was huddle in bed.

It was coats piled up on top of blankets, said Mr. Kotz, who was 31 at the time.

By the second day they were colder and hungrier, and Mrs. Kotz was getting frantic that she might go into early labor. So Mr. Kotz set out on foot for a neighbor s house about a half mile away. He returned later that day on a snowmobile, and after feasting on baked potatoes off a wood burner, the Kotzes spent the night at the neighbor s house she on the couch and he on the floor.

On the third day, with the worst of the blizzard over, Mr. Kotz said he walked to a village store to stock up on food.

I don t remember everything I picked up. But I do remember my wife asking for two things: some red wine and a German chocolate cake, he said.

Two weeks later, Mrs. Kotz, who was 30, gave birth to the couple s first child, Jason. They now live in rural western Pennsylvania, about seven miles from the nearest town.

It s been 32 degrees below zero out here, but nothing fazes us anymore after going through that blizzard, Mr. Kotz said.

A visitor on skis

Mahala Kay was 26 and enrolled at the University of Toledo s law school. She recalled awakening the morning of the blizzard to see her mother staring out a back window of their house at more snow than either of them had ever seen.

Like many Toledoans, they spent the day listening to the howling wind and watching the snow fall.

The next day [Jan. 27] was brilliant sunshine, clear as a bell, but just all this snow to deal with, Mrs. Kay recalled. The snow was so deep you couldn t even use a shovel.

Mrs. Kay can remember spotting an icy figure off in the distance that was slowly gliding its way to her mother s house near Spencer Street and South Avenue in South Toledo.

As the figure got closer she realized it was her boyfriend of three months, and that he had skied cross-country seven miles.

His glasses, his moustache, and his beard were just encrusted in ice, she recalled. I asked, What possessed you to ski seven miles?, and he said, I wanted to see that you were all right.

A year and a half later, they married.

I knew at that moment I was going to keep him around, Mrs. Kay said brightly.

A liquid souvenir

Ken Dressel of Ottawa Lake, Mich., has kept a blizzard memento for 30 years: 13 gallons of melted snow.

Preserving a historical event was the idea, the 72-year-old said.

Mr. Dressel, who is an uncle of slain Toledo police Detective Keith Dressel, was an electronic technician at Toledo Express Airport in 1978. In the week following the storm, Mr. Dressel said, he filled the bed of his pickup truck with snow from the airport s parking lot.

He chose the snow at Toledo Express, he said, because that s where official weather readings are recorded.

I just shoveled the snow directly into the truck, Mr. Dressel recalled last week. People wondered what ... I was doing and I said, Just watch, you ll know.

He then drove home and hauled the snow in buckets to his basement laundry room, where it was put to melt in 5-gallon jugs and dozens of small glass bottles that were commonly used for injection medicines.

Those initial 40 gallons of blizzard water have dwindled over the years as Mr. Dressel gave away and even sold bottles.

In 1980 he put a classified ad in The Blade: Snow water from Blizzard of 78. Make Offer. Yet the advertisement was more for fun than making money, he said.

I gave a bottle to someone two weeks ago, Mr. Dressel said. They were in the blizzard and they wanted a bottle, and they knew I had it, so I gave them a bottle.

Mr. Dressel can recall being at the airport the Sunday after the blizzard hit. It was when hundreds of U.S. Army troops with heavy equipment began arriving to dig the region out of snow-induced paralysis. They would stay for another week as they cleared more than 300 miles of roads.

Could it happen again?

Considering today s widespread worries about global warming, could a blizzard like that of 1978 ever strike here again?

State climatologist Jeffrey Rogers believes that while global warming may diminish the likelihood for epic blizzards in Ohio, he isn t ready to rule out another one.

Mr. Rogers noted how some climate experts contend that global warming will exacerbate the extremes of weather, producing more large storms.

At its core the 1978 blizzard was more about low pressure and high winds than unheralded temperatures or all-at-once snowfall.

Wind-chill temperatures aside, the mercury at Toledo Express Airport never went below 6 degrees during the storm.

We ve had winters recently when we ve gotten more snow, said Mr. Rogers, who is a geology professor at Ohio State University, but they ve never really been accompanied by high winds and blizzard conditions.

Also crucial to the blizzard s might was the amount of snow already on the ground that it could blow around.

So a future, one-off blizzard during a warming trend may not have as much snow to play with as the blizzard of 1978 did.

Of course, it s near about impossible to forecast a century out.

It would definitely be premature to suggest that such a thing couldn t happen again, Mr. Rogers said.

Contact JC Reindl at: jreindl@theblade.com or 419-724-6065.

First Published January 27, 2008, 4:44 p.m.