On January 26 and 27, 1967, Chicago received 23.0 inches of snow, still the city’s official storm-total record. The National Weather Service notes that Midway was the official climate site then. Snow started on a Thursday morning and kept going into the next day. O’Hare and the rest of the city shut down for several days. An estimated 20,000 cars and 500 buses were stranded. About 60 people died in connection with the storm, 26 of them from heart attacks while shoveling.
Later storms have come close. January 1999 totaled 21.6 inches, and the 2011 blizzard totaled 21.2 inches at O’Hare. None of them has taken the record, and none of them hit a city as unprepared to dig out as Chicago was in 1967.
The house problem is duration
A record snow total is a photograph. The strain on a house is the next several days: heat running around the clock, roads that a service truck cannot use, and people stuck at home while the system either keeps up or does not. In 1967 that meant a city of boilers and older furnaces with no easy way to get a technician to the door. The physics has not changed. A furnace that fails on the first morning of a big storm may wait days for a repair if the streets are full of abandoned cars.
Continuous runtime is also when a cracked heat exchanger or a blocked flue becomes dangerous. People reach for the oven, a gas range, or an outdoor heater when the house gets cold. Those are carbon monoxide emergencies waiting on a closed-up house. A heating system that was checked in the fall is the alternative. So is a plan to leave, and stay with someone who has heat, if the equipment fails and the roads are closed.
Shoveling is part of the storm’s history
The Weather Service’s account of 1967 includes those 26 shoveling deaths for a reason. Wet, deep snow on a cold day is hard work. Pace it, and treat chest pain as a reason to stop and get help. Keep furnace and boiler vents clear while you are out there. A drift against a side-wall exhaust will shut a modern system off even when the rest of the equipment is healthy.
The maintenance that respects this history
You cannot practice for a 23-inch snow. You can go into winter with a heat exchanger that has been looked at, a filter that can support long runtimes, and vents that sit above the drift line. That is the point of a fall maintenance visit. Zima HVAC is in Mundelein, serving Lake County. Call (847) 323-8314 before the season produces a storm you have to ride out at home.