ITEM PHOTO BY OWEN O’ROURKE
Virginia and Donald Lucia are pictured 20 years after the April Fools’ Day blizzard of 1997.
By BRIDGET TURCOTTE
LYNN — Only three to five inches of snow is expected this April Fools’ Day. But 20 years ago, the joke was on the residents of the Northeastern United States when Mother Nature dumped rain, sleet and more than 25 inches of snow on every town from Maine to Maryland.
“We couldn’t get out from our front or side door that day,” said Virginia Lucia, who the late Item photographer Walter Hoey captured shoveling snow from the top of her car two decades ago. “It was just so much snow.”
Virginia and her husband, Donald Lucia, have lived in their Fernwood Avenue home for 56 years. Donald, who worked for the Swampscott Public School system, said more than anything, he remembers the flooding that followed the snowfall.
“And, of course, these storms bring out a certain sense of camaraderie,” he said. “You see your neighbors and you help each other out.”
The record-setting spring blizzard prompted the deaths of three men in Massachusetts and Rhode Island; all suffered heart attacks while shoveling snow.
Prior to the storm, Boston had received 26.5 inches of snow for the season. People took warnings of a blizzard lightly because of the anticipated storm’s date. Plows had already been put away from the spring season. March 30, 1997, a sunny day with a high temperature of 63 degrees, didn’t help convince anyone otherwise.
But a cold front hit on March 31. From 7-11 p.m., an inch of snow fell each hour. From 11-3 a.m. on April 1, three inches piled up per hour. With 25.4 inches measured at Logan International Airport, the snowstorm was the fourth largest in Boston’s history. The biggest was the North American Blizzard of 2003, which totaled 27.5 inches, beating the Blizzard of ‘78 by .4 inches.
About 1,000 Massachusetts drivers spent the night trapped in their vehicles, Logan Airport was shut down, and trees and large limbs fell, leaving many without electricity; 8,000 in Lynn alone.
City officials used the Broadway Fire Station as an emergency management command post, Breed Junior High as an evacuation center, and Greater Lynn Senior Services as a shelter.
A 4-year-old boy fell into Sluice Pond while playing with his older brother. His brother jumped into the frigid water after him, as did their father, who helped rescue them both. A Howard Street woman went into labor during the storm’s peak, a Boston Street man was injured by his snowblower, and a Saratoga Street man was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital to have two of his partially severed fingers reattached.
On April 2, 1997, then-Lynn Mayor Patrick J. McManus estimated the April Fools’ Day surprise cost the city $100,000 in plowing and sanding costs, on top of the $200,000 budgeted and mostly already spent during the winter.
Schools in Lynn, Peabody, Nahant, Lynnfield, Revere and Saugus were closed for the first time that year, according to a 1997 Item article. Marblehead and Swampscott had a two-hour delay.
Bridget Turcotte can be reached at bturcotte@itemlive.com. Follow her on Twitter @BridgetTurcotte