Effects
The storm, referred to as the Great White Hurricane, paralyzed the East Coast from the Chesapeake Bay to Maine, as well as the Atlantic provinces of Canada. Telegraph infrastructure was disabled, isolating Montreal and most of the large northeastern U.S. cities from Washington, D.C. to Boston for days. Following the storm, New York began placing its telegraph and telephone infrastructure underground to prevent their destruction. From Chesapeake Bay through the New England area, more than 200 ships were either grounded or wrecked, resulting in the deaths of at least 100 seamen.
In New York, neither rail nor road transport was possible anywhere for days, and drifts across the New YorkâNew Haven rail line at Westport, Connecticut took eight days to clear; transportation gridlock as a result of the storm was partially responsible for the creation of the first underground subway system in the United States, which opened nine years later in Boston. The New York Stock Exchange was closed for two days.
Fire stations were immobilized, and property loss from fire alone was estimated at $25 million. Severe flooding occurred after the storm due to melting snow, especially in the Brooklyn area, which was more susceptible to serious flooding due to its topography. Efforts were made to push the snow into the Atlantic Ocean. More than 400 people died from the storm and the ensuing cold, including 200 in New York City alone. Among them was former U.S. Senator Roscoe Conkling.
The blizzard resulted in the founding of the Christman Bird and Wildlife Sanctuary located near Delanson, Schenectady County, New York. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970.
Read more about this topic: Great Blizzard Of 1888
Famous quotes containing the word effects:
“Oh that my Pow’r to Saving were confin’d:
Why am I forc’d, like Heav’n, against my mind,
To make Examples of another Kind?
Must I at length the Sword of Justice draw?
Oh curst Effects of necessary Law!
How ill my Fear they by my Mercy scan,
Beware the Fury of a Patient Man.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)
“Society’s double behavioral standard for women and for men is, in fact, a more effective deterrent than economic discrimination because it is more insidious, less tangible. Economic disadvantages involve ascertainable amounts, but the very nature of societal value judgments makes them harder to define, their effects harder to relate.”
—Anne Tucker (b. 1945)
“Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)