And yet the forecasters themselves were not as heartless as the foregoing might imply. Certain portions of private writings are revealed by Mr. Laskin in The Children's Blizzard which show their meticulous care in recording data and their frustrations with supplying information to the public in a timely fashion. Frequently, local politics and governmental regulations prevented adequate warnings and limited the data available to be interpreted, so a forecaster might have readings from as far north as the Yukon, but nothing farther, and no one would be sending any updated readings until a prearranged time. It was a recipe for disaster.
Can they be blamed? Maybe. Were they villains? Perhaps its better to say they were simply fallible, and the failure to warn the populace of this approaching blizzard was a monstrous error. Certainly they were over-confident. After this blizzard, the US Signal Corps was replaced as a forecaster of weather by the Weather Service, which exists to this day.
The third story involves the storm itself. In this book, it forms a 'character' all on it's own. Laskin gives a scientific-based understanding of it as a weather system, but also tells of its effects on the people in their homes, trapped outdoors, or in their one-room schools. The violent differences in temperatures, for instance, increased the electrical discharge in the atmposphere. Thus, as people tried to stoke their stoves with fuel, electrical arcs jumped out at their hands. This is just one small detail of a blizzard I never hope to see.
And I live in Upstate New York. Just reading this book let me know I hadn't seen anything like this, the storm that brought the word "Blizzard" to the American public.
I tore through this book hardly putting it down, it really was that good. Of course, it had everything I like: Disaster, history, science, medical topics, everything. If you like details of hypothermia and what early frontier folk did to survive in hostile climates, you'll like it too, I suspect.
If I have any reservations, it is this: I wished for a map of the area and the weather system, which wasn't included in my uncorrected proof. Hopefully, HarperCollins will have the foresight to include one in the final offering. A small matter, though, for a rewarding read.
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