Life in Switzerland: The Oklahoma Blizzard of 2009

The great Oklahoma Blizzard of 2009 started out looking relatively weak. The rain started at 3:15am on Christmas Eve, then became sleet around 7am and then turned to snow around midday. But then the wind picked up, and the gusts topped out at 53 mph. Just after noon the National Weather Service canceled the Winter Storm Warning and upgraded it to a Blizzard Warning, and then we began to take notice. The news stations began reporting accidents on every major and minor highway, and by the time we got news of a 50 car pileup with injury on I-40 including two police cars and an ambulance, the highway patrol had decided to close all highways in the Oklahoma City metro area. The governor declared a state of emergency and asked President Obama to declare a federal state of emergency.

Churches began canceling Christmas Eve services in droves, and by 2pm my church, St. Michael's Episcopal, had followed suit. The snow continued until about 6pm, and once nightfall hit the town became the quietest I've ever heard it.

Norman, Oklahoma gets a white Christmas about 3-5% of the time, or 5 times every 100 years. From my personal memory, this was the first White Christmas in more than 20 years, since 1987 when I was 5 years old, and only the second one in my lifetime. This storm went into the record books as the biggest blizzard in Oklahoma history, with 14 inches of snow in less than 8 hours.

On Christmas Day I tried unsuccessfully to take advantage of all the snow and go sledding with a friend. The biggest problem with going sledding in Oklahoma usually is having enough snow. If you have enough snow, the second biggest problem is finding a hill. It's a plains state, so in general everything is flat. Once you have snow and a hill, the third biggest problem is finding a sled, and that's where we ran into trouble. It's not something most households in my town readily keep in stock because we only get to use it once every 5-10 years, and nobody I knew had one.