The Blizzard of ’96: 17 Years Later

Before there was Snowmageddon, Snowpocalypse or Snowmageddon 2 (Snow’s Return), there was the Blizzard of '96.

Monday marked the 17th anniversary of the Jan. 7-8, 1996 blizzard that dumped an unprecedented 30.7 inches on Philly -- a record that still stands.

The storm kind of gets lost in the lore of Philly snowstorms after we got 28.5, 23.2 and 15.8 inches in separate storms (named above) in the winter of 2009-10 but for those who were around in 1996 that storm lives on as the big one that paralyzed the region.

If you were a kid, you remember it for giving you a week off school; if you are a parent, you remember trying to dig out from it while having to entertain your kids; and if you owned a business, you remember worrying about when you would be able to get your supplies replenished.

Plenty of folks also remember watching the Eagles lose in Dallas to the eventual Super Bowl-champion Cowboys in the NFC playoffs as the snow fell on Philly.

For NBC10’s Glenn “Hurricane” Schwartz, the storm marked one of his first (and possibly biggest) calls for NBC10.

“It was a couple months after I started,” Schwartz recalls. “Some people thought I was going way out on a limb by predicting so much snow. By Saturday night, we were predicting 20 to 30 inches of snow. We never had more than 21.3 inches before. We beat the old record by almost 10 inches.