Jim Bradshaw: South Louisiana isn't immune to February cold
It’s not uncommon for south Louisiana to enjoy a few balmy days at the beginning of February, lulling us into the idea that spring is actually here.
But then, along about Valentine’s Day, that delusion can be shattered by cold air plunging down from the North or wafting our way from the snow-capped Rockies.
In most years, the cold snap is not that frosty, just a way of Mother Nature saying, “Gotcha!”
But sometimes mid-February will bring a bone-chilling freeze. We’ve had as few like that in recent years, but we’ve never seen anything like the one that sent icebergs down the Mississippi all the way to the Gulf.
On Feb. 12, 1899, what was probably Louisiana’s most widespread winter storm spread “a white mantle” of snow from the northwest corner of the state to the mouth of the Mississippi River.
Pioneer weatherman Isaac Cline, who gave that description, reported that frigid temperatures “commenced moving southward with such great rapidity that it caused a blizzard over the entire South.”
Cline said that “great ice gorges formed in the Mississippi River above New Orleans and floes of ice with icebergs more than 10 feet high passed down the river by New Orleans for more than two weeks.”
H.H. Lawes, the weatherman at Port Eads at the usually balmy mouth of the river, wrote in the February 1899 report of the Louisiana Climate and Crop Service:
“At about 2 o’clock the morning of the 12th it began to sleet and snow and continued until noon of that day, but the snow was so fine that it did not cover the ground to any great extent. In open places it was about one-half inch thick. It was freezing all day. The thermometer measured 19 degrees at 7 p.m. with the weather clearing and the wind blowing at the rate of 40 miles per hour from the north.”
The next day, Feb. 13, was even colder. Laws reported a low of 10 degrees at the river’s mouth, where “everything was one solid sheet of ice.”
There were a few warmer days, but hard cold returned on the 17th, when Lawes reported that “at 9 p.m. [the wind] was blowing a gale from [the north] and the weather was getting colder.”
On Sunday, Feb. 19, at 10 a.m., “small blocks of ice began passing out to sea through South Pass.”
By 6 p.m. “at least one-third of the pass was covered and some of the blocks were about 20 feet in diameter and from one to two feet thick.” This continued until 3 p.m. on the 20th, when the ice “began to decrease in volume.”
In that same Climate and Crop Service report, a weather watcher from Paincourtville in Assumption Parish reported: “Huge chunks of ice floating on Bayou Lafourche impeded steamboat navigation. ... The weather of the 12th-13th was the coldest within memory of living men in this section.”
The weather observer in Jeanerette saw ice floating on Bayou Teche and the Rayne weather report includes the notation that eggs in the observer’s chicken house “froze perfectly hard.”
There was a report of a similar storm more than 100 years before the 1899 blow, but that one was earlier in the winter.
In a letter written in 1784, Villars Dubreuil, a planter who lived on the Mississippi River, described the unseasonable weather to a friend in Paris.
“We have experienced winds from the north cold enough to make us lay aside the ordinary lightness of our apparel,” he wrote.
“The white frosts of the morning began with the month of September and became more frequent until the 15th of November. At this time the season assumed a character of extraordinary rigor.
"The winds blew continuously be squalls and with unheard of violence from north to south. … The variations of weather were such that I saw many times, within a period of six hours, the thermometer Reaumer drop from 20 degrees above zero to 2 and 3 degrees below.”
On the Reaumer scale, the freezing point of water is zero and the boiling point is 80 degrees. The drop in the thermometer described in the letter would be from about 75 degrees to about 25 degrees Fahrenheit.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, "Cajuns and Other Characters," is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.