You think it’s cold now? You should’ve seen the winter of 1950
You think it’s freezing outside now?
These wintry cold snaps happen from time to time in Whatcom County, when arctic air slides south from British Columbia and the northeast winds howl out of the Fraser Valley.
But if you’re older than 70, you might remember the winter of 1950 and a month-long freeze that stretched from January to early February.
Temperatures fell to near zero and stayed there for days. Winds reached 75 mph and 5 to 6 feet of snow covered the ground. Whatcom Waterway and the Nooksack River at Ferndale froze over, according to Bellingham Herald files.
“We haven’t had anything close to what we had in 1950,” said Gary Schneider, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Seattle. “That was unusual, by our normal standards.”
It was even worse than the snowstorm of late December 1996, which dumped several feet of snow over several days. Then-Gov. Mike Lowrey called that storm the “worst in 70 years.”
Schneider called January 1950 an “outlier” with an average daily high of 27.8 degrees and an average low of 13.4 degrees.
Normal temperatures this time of year are 45 and 33, according to NOAA records.
January-February 1950 saw the coldest temperatures in Bellingham since records were kept starting in 1949 — it was -2 degrees on both Jan. 29 and Feb. 1.
It was so cold that 17 record low temperatures remain on the books from January to February 1950.
In contrast, only four low-temperature records were set during the February Freeze last year.
