The Valentine’s Day Blizzard, Norman, Oklahoma

On Valentine’s Day, 2021, a mas­sive win­ter storm pushed across the cen­tral and south­ern US plains, plung­ing tem­per­a­tures to record-break­ing lows and dump­ing sig­nif­i­cant snow over the affected areas. In the ensu­ing days, grid oper­a­tors enacted rolling black­outs [Sidenote: Grid oper­a­tors pre­fer to call these planned short-term ser­vice inter­rup­tions. ] and power out­ages affected mil­lions of Oklahoma and Texas res­i­dents. All 254 Texas coun­ties were affected.

The tem­per­a­ture at the Bureau reached 5ºF (-15ºC) with a wind chill of -19ºF (-29ºC) that after­noon. By Tuesday, Oklahoma City recorded a tem­per­a­ture of −14°F (−26°C), the cold­est since 1899.

Sunday after­noon we bravely fool­ishly climbed into the Bureau’s MINI Cooper with a Rolleiflex cam­era and a par­tially-shot roll of expired black-and-white film to doc­u­ment the bliz­zard. An hour or so later we were back at the Bureau devel­op­ing the film in a day­light tank. That evening, after the film was suf­fi­ciently dry, we cut the neg­a­tives into strips of three frames each and slid them into a plas­tic neg­a­tive stor­age sleeve, weight­ing the sleeve under a dic­tio­nary overnight to flat­ten the film.

We scanned the neg­a­tives on Monday. We imported them into Adobe® Lightroom on Tuesday and updated the meta­data and made tonal adjust­ments. We also did some ini­tial retouch­ing (dust and scratch removal). Retouching con­tin­ued into Wednesday, when we exported the final files. We present them today for your enjoyment: 

Main Street in Snow, Valentine’s Day 2021

Trees in Snow, University of Oklahoma, Valentine’s Day 2021

James Garner Memorial in Snow, Valentine’s Day 2021

Ellison Hall in Snow, University of Oklahoma, Valentine’s Day 2021

100 Block of East Main Street in Snow, Valentine’s Day 2021

Sooner Theatre in Snow, Valentine’s Day 2021