This weekend marks the dates of several weather-related historical events.
First, "Galloping Gertie," Washington State's original Tacoma Narrows bridge, collapsed on November 7, 1940, just months after opening. Winds blowing through the Narrows set up harmonic resonances as soon as it opened, and the nickname stuck. The
video of its collapse (less the music and newsreel-type narration) was something of a standard in science classes when I was in school.
What I learned only recently is that the very same storm moved east across the Rockies and became the Armistice Day Blizzard of November 10-12, which blew across the Midwest, causing 145 deaths from varied causes like a train crash and 3 shipwrecks on Lake Michigan. Many hunters froze, being caught out in shirtsleeves (temperatures ahead of the storm were unseasonably hot, pushing 70F/21C) when freezing rain, snow, and wind struck without warning (forecasting then was not what it is now). Some locations in Minnesota received over 2 feet (600mm) of snow, setting single-storm records that would stand until the Halloween Blizzard of 1991.
Speaking of shipwrecks, one of the most well-known ones in recent years came on November 10, 1975, when the
Edmund Fitzgerald was lost on Lake Superior when "the gales of November came early." All 29 hands were lost. This was news in states around the Great Lakes, but it certainly became part of popular lore via Gordon Lightfoot's ballad.