'Storm of the Century' remembered 30 years later

The snow started falling on a Friday.Flakes rained from the sky, leaving piles of snow. The Tri-Cities had seen snow before. It has seen snow since.But never like this."I saw snow over my life," Kingsport Police Chief Dale Phipps said. "But nothing like that."It was the Blizzard of '93. The Storm of the Century.Thirty years ago today, the storm ripped through the Tennessee Valley, leaving inches of snow on the ground and leaving a legacy behind that still lives on when a snow comes and people ask, "Remember the Blizzard of '93?"Phipps said he remembers it well. A lot was going on in his life. His middle daughter had been born prematurely, and he was worried about her health as the storm made its way northward."I remember it vividly because there was a lot going on," he said.The cyclonic storm started in the Gulf of Mexico on March 12. It quickly became a problem.Storm surges flooded areas along the Florida coast and left homes watered down and homes built on stilts with ocean water up to the doorways.The storm rapidly moved northward, dumping snow in north Georgia and parts of Alabama. It kept going and dumped more than 5 feet of snow on Mount Leconte in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, according to the National Weather Service.By the time it reached the Tri-Cities, it was nowhere near stopping."Storm of the Century slams the Tri-Cities" read the headline in the Kingsport Times News on March 14. "Storm leaves residents stranded" the headline for the Johnson City Press exclaimed on March 15.The snow lasted for a day, but the cleanup lasted for days to come.Phipps was 30 years old at the time. He is now the only person on the Kingsport Police Department who experienced the storm.Things were different then."During those days, we didn't have four-wheel drive like we do now," he said. "So, we had limited four-wheel drive capability."Kingsport Fire Chief Scotty Boyd also remembers the day vividly."I was on duty when the thing hit; we couldn't get away," he said. "The folks who were at work pretty much stayed at work for three or four days until they were able to get home."Boyd said they ran a lot of calls during that time. He said calls coming in were almost continuous — alarms were going off and power lines were down.He said they put chains on the fire trucks and would use four-wheel drives to scout out first. Boyd said everyone worked together in emergency services."Especially the dispatchers," Boyd said. "They were getting bombarded. They had their hands full too."The storm dumped 14 inches of snow in Kingsport, National Weather Service records show.In other areas it was worse. Wise, Virginia recorded two feet. Mountain City saw 30 inches of snow. Seventeen inches of snow fell on Erwin and the weather service recorded 21 inches of the white stuff dumped on Elizabethon.For days, the Tri-Cities found itself boxed in."Everyone was kind of sheltering in place because they had to," Phipps said. "There was nowhere else to go."Newspaper reports from the time show tractor trailers stuck and abandoned on the interstates. In the Johnson City Press, a photo from the weekend showed one home's roof caved in after being showered with snow.Temperatures dropped as well.Weather reports showed that just the day before the highs were in the high 40s. By the time the blizzard hit, temperatures dropped into the 20s and teens.But then the temperatures rose in days and the snow started melting off. The National Weather Service recorded temperatures of 51 degrees in Kingsport and Elizabethton by Tuesday. Three days after the "Storm of the Century" hit, snow depth in Kingsport was at nine inches. By Wednesday, there were three inches of snow recorded in Kingsport and Erwin recorded four inches.It came and it went."It was a perfect storm," Phipps said.