Photos: Winter blasts from Hamilton’s past

Hamilton's been dumped on. Not just today but in years gone by.

We've collected a number of photos from The Spectator archives that show you just how much the snow blows.

On Dec. 11, 1944, a few flakes turned into a raging blizzard that left more snow and bigger drifts than this city has ever seen.

The Spectator's StreetBeat columnist Paul Wilson wrote about the blizzard of 1944 when several people died" in a more recent column.

Transportation was crippled. Factories, stores and schools shut down. A few moments from the Big Dig:

* It wasn't much below freezing and the snow was heavy. An urgent appeal went out to all people over 50 not to shovel and not to walk through the heavy drifts. But overexertion claimed three Hamilton men - Bert Culm, Joe Long, Robert Atkinson.

* There was just one snowblower in Hamilton in 1944. But the city's most formidable weapon broke down on King East the night of the storm. They fixed it the next day, but a few hours later it broke down again."

Another deadly storm was the Blizzard of 77, a five-day storm that hit from Jan. 28 to Feb. 1, 1977.

The blizzard blasted the Niagara, Haldimand-Norfolk and Hamilton areas with a winter's worth of snow and arctic temperatures. Hamilton was hammered, but it was worse in the Niagara area where two people died and in Buffalo, where the death toll was 29, wrote The Spec's Mark McNeil in a recent column remembering the storm.

It's estimated more than 100 people succumbed in the storm that tracked from the Prairies to the East Coast.

Environment Canada climatologist Dave Phillips says it was a weather bomb ... the granddaddy of them all," something that usually only happens over oceans.

It became the most intense inland storm that North America has ever seen," he said. Warm air from the Gulf of Mexico collided with some brutally cold air from the north, and it just exploded over the Great Lakes and then came right into eastern end of Lake Erie and Niagara area."

Jennifer Moore is an editorial assistant at The Spectator. jmoore@thespec.com