Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
40 YEARS SINCE OUR SNOW DAY
It could never happen here — until it did
It was a day that no one could have imagined. And even when it happened, some people had a hard time believing it.
On Jan. 19, 1977 — 40 years ago Thursday — it snowed in South Florida.
Glenn E. Schwartz, a forecaster at the National Hurricane Center in 1977 and now chief metereologist at NBC Philadelphia, was working the midnight shift at the National Weather Service. In a phone interview Wednesday, Schwartz recalled the day it snowed.
“I don’t remember the inauguration at all,” Schwartz said, referring to President Jimmy Carter’s swearing-in the next day. “I was totally obsessed with the snow.”
He was operating the radar and relaying information to the senior forecasters, some of whom had been there for decades and had much more experience than the young Schwartz. With each passing hour, he was getting reports of the snow heading farther south.
Schwartz would run to the room where the veteran forecasters were and tell them the snow was coming. What could stop it from hitting South Florida? he asked them.
“Never happened, won’t happen” was
basically the response. Until it did happen. Schwartz was just about to issue the report when his supervisor, still not believing it, stopped him. Ten to 15 minutes later, he said, the calls started coming in. “And the whole city went crazy,” he said.
According to forecasters, the farthest south snow had ever fallen in Florida was along a line from Fort Myers to Fort Pierce back in 1899. But now, for the first time on record, snow was falling in Southeast Florida, from West Palm Beach to Broward County and south across Miami-Dade.
West Palm Beach first reported snow at 6:10 a.m. Between 8 and 9:30 a.m., snow flurries were falling across Broward and Miami-Dade, known back then as Dade County. And then, it was over.
It was astounding news, nonetheless.
The front page of that day’s nowdefunct Miami News blared “Snow in Miami!” in large type usually reserved for the end of wars. Above the headline, the words “Souvenir edition: The day that couldn’t happen.”
The front page from that evening’s Fort Lauderdale News, which later became the Sun Sentinel, simply blasted the word “Snow!” in its giant headline.
“The Chamber of Commerce’s ‘liquid sunshine’ crystalized and it snowed, by gosh, right here among the sheltering palms,” read the article by former News staff writer Paul Beeman. The report said hundreds of people, both locals and tourists, flooded the newspaper’s switchboard with calls. Another story on the front page noted that it had been colder in Fort Lauderdale that day than in Anchorage, Alaska.
In Palm Beach County, each letter in the Palm Beach Post’s name was adorned with graphical snow and icicles, with “It’s COLD, Snow Foolin’ ” emblazoned across the front.
The snow didn’t stay long. According to the News, it “melted when it hit the ground but it stuck briefly to [kids’] coats and woolen ski caps.”
Schwartz said he didn’t actually see the snow because it would have meant leaving his post. Plus, he doesn’t think it actually snowed where he was in Coral Gables.
Having now worked in Philadelphia for over 20 years, Scwartz still counts the day it snowed in South Florida as one of the most historic weather events he’s witnessed, including Hurricane Andrew, which he covered while working in Fort Myers, and the Blizzard of 1996 in Philadelphia. Could snow fall here again? “History has already shown us that it can, and if it’s happened once, it can definitely happen again someday,” the National Weather Service said in a statement.
Thursday’s forecast, which calls for highs in the high 70s and low 80s across South Florida, doesn’t include snow. If it did, you can bet Donald Trump would have some competition for the day’s big story on the eve of his inauguration.