CHICAGO — A massive storm with wind gusts up to 81 mph howled across the nation’s midsection yesterday, snapping trees and power lines, ripping off roofs, delaying flights and soaking commuters hunched under crumpled umbrellas.
Spanning from the Dakotas to the eastern Great Lakes, the unusual system mesmerized meteorologists because of its size and because it had barometric pressure similar to a Category 3 hurricane, but with much less destructive power. Scientists said that the storm had the force of a blizzard minus the snow.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said that the system’s pressure reading yesterday was among the lowest ever in a nontropical storm in the mainland U.S. Spokeswoman Susan Buchanan said that the storm was within the top five strongest storms in terms of low pressure.
Earlier, the agency said the storm’s pressure was worse than that produced by the Blizzard of 1978, the March 1993 “Storm of the Century” or the November 1975 storm that sank the Edmund Fitzgerald freighter, memorialized in a song by Gordon Lightfoot.
