THIS HAPPENED IN TEXAS

It began in silence. At 4 o'clock one morning a drizzle started in a big section of the Texas Panhandle. There was no wind. The temperature hovered at the freezing point, barely above, barely below. Fog, rain & sleet froze on trees and telephone wires. By noon trees in Amarillo were groaning with the weight of ice on their limbs. By midnight three-fourths of the town's telephone circuits were useless. By 1:30 the next afternoon the power lines were down. Western Union lost 800 poles, 2,000 crossarms, had 100,000 wire breaks. In Amarillo 100 telephone poles toppled (throughout the storm area, 2,200). Radio towers went down. When electric power failed, Amarillo's water supply went dry, for 10,000,000 gallons stored underground could not be pumped to the surface. Amarillo's fire department, answering many false alarms, had only enough water for 15 minutes of real fire fighting.

Still no winds blew. The cold was not intense. Like some legendary city perishing before the coming of a new Ice Age, Amarillo sank quietly, irresistibly deeper & deeper beneath its sheath of ice, until it was cut off from the outside world. Now and then a lonely radio amateur got through with some word. The nerves of civilization quietly parted. Wide clean streets became tangles of wires. Forty-year-old trees, planted and cared for as trees are cared for only in the plain country, groaned and creaked all through the night, booming as they split open.

The Texas Panhandle is a high (4,000 ft.) plateau, famed for its freakish weather, its cities that rise abruptly above the plain, its ranches, wheat and oil fields. It is so flat and landmarks are so rare that around Amarillo (pop. 52,000) early settlers plowed furrows from settlement to settlement to guide travelers across the trackless, treeless expanse. One such furrow was about 150 miles long. It was so bleak that an army officer who explored it in 1849 reported: "This country is, and must remain, uninhabited forever." Its wind and weather became so famous that Texans said, "There's nothing but a sagging barbed-wire fence between Amarillo and the North Star."

Meteorologists explained that a low pressure area trapped over southern New Mexico by a high pressure to the north and northeast caused the storm last week. Temperature two degrees higher would have stopped the ice. A high wind would have broken the spell. But for 48 hours nothing happened. The region seemed deserted. An airline pilot making the first flight over the Panhandle two days after the storm reported that there were no signs of life, no cars on the highways and no trains seen operating, only a few lights showing in Amarillo's business district.

Then a slight warm wind arose. In four hours the ice was gone. There were no major catastrophies, no fires of consequence, no deaths. Amarillo stirred like a somnambulist awakening, estimated its damages in the millions. Four days passed before telephone and telegraph communications made Amarillo once again part of the outside world.

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