Impact
Midwest airports were closed, some for several days. Thousands of flights were canceled. Detroit Metro (DTW) was one of the most severely impacted airports. Thousands of passengers traveling on Northwest Airlines (NWA) were stranded for hours. In 2001, NWA agreed to pay more than $7M in compensation to victims. Some passengers spent more than eight and a half hours in their planes after arriving at DTW.
In southern Ontario, Pearson International Airport had to be shut down, while numerous flights from Ottawa International Airport were canceled. A series of additional snowstorms over the next 10 days gave Toronto a total of 118 centimetres (46 in), a record monthly total for the month of January, prompting then-mayor Mel Lastman to infamously call in the Canadian Forces to assist the snow removal with the city at a near standstill. As a result, the mayor and city, through the media endured ridicule from other parts of Canada more prone to such high snowfall amounts. The series of storms that hit Toronto were severe enough to be the winter Storm of the Century despite its long duration.
Rail service was halted or delayed, and highways were impassable. Lake Shore Drive in Chicago was closed for the first time ever. Stranded travellers were accommodated in emergency shelters. The bitterly cold temperatures created large ice floes on the inland waterways, causing shipping delays.
Schools were closed for several days, many businesses were closed as well. Of those that were able to remain open, stores selling snow removal equipment were doing a booming business.
There was also a nationwide blood shortage since a high proportion of blood donations come from the Midwest and many could not make it to the hospital and donate during the storm or during the subsequent cold snap.
In much of Northwest Indiana, blackouts occurred for days at a time. Porter County was without electricity for about 3 days total. Local buildings, such as schools, offered generator-powered heat in their auditoriums.
Read more about this topic: North American Blizzard Of 1999
Famous quotes containing the word impact:
“The question confronting the Church today is not any longer whether the man in the street can grasp a religious message, but how to employ the communications media so as to let him have the full impact of the Gospel message.”
—Pope John Paul II (b. 1920)
“Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.”
—David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)
“Conquest is the missionary of valour, and the hard impact of military virtues beats meanness out of the world.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)