January Thaw

On swirl-dimpled, symbol-specked Weather Bureau maps, the storm gathered in classic pattern: polar air and Gulf of Mexico winds butted along a line that curled like an overturned roller coaster; winds overhead fluxed cold and warm. Translated into ground-level consequences last week, the winter's most severe storm heaved snow, sleet, gales, tornadoes and floods over most of the U.S. west to the Rockies, by week's end was responsible for more than 100 deaths.

Heaviest single toll was in Pittston, Pa., where the ice-clogged Susquehanna River tore away a railroad bed, gnawed a soft. hole into the weakened river bank, finally ate through a ceiling of the Pennsylvania Coal Co.'s big River Slope Mine. Without warning, 45 anthracite miners were washed waist-high by tomb-cold rising water. While emergency crews dumped telephone poles, bales of hay and even empty railroad gondola cars into the hole to block the water, 33 miners threaded through abandoned tunnels and shafts to safety. The other twelve were presumed drowned.

Elsewhere in western Pennsylvania and neighboring New York and Ohio, record rains (5 in. in 24 hours in Columbus) swished over frozen ground, ran off into rivers like the Olentangy, the Kokosing, the Chagrin and Racoon Creek, swelled them until they overflowed to flood scores of cities and towns, batter buildings with massive hunks of ice. Ohio's Governor Mike Di Salle and Pennsylvania's David Lawrence declared emergencies. In Columbus Mrs. Betty Montgomery, 59, a wheelchair-bound invalid, sat stolidly at her window, watched the Scioto River rising up her wall. When flood water reached the first floor, she tied a string to the trigger of a .22 cal. rifle, aimed it at her head and pulled the string. In south Buffalo an ice dam backed up Cazenovia Creek until a wall of water finally burst the ice; the resulting wave swept automobiles underwater, ripped a 515-ft.-long grain boat from its moorings in the Buffalo River and slammed it into the steel-girdered Michigan Avenue Bridge. The bridge shivered and collapsed.

As storm ended, sun reappeared, temperatures dropped, floods eased and the Weather Bureau mapped a heavy cold wave that all but froze the floods in their tracks.

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