Incompetence+Snow=Bad News for Bilandic

     We've just started crawling out of our holes we dug for ourselves to ride out the polar vortex, which seemed oddly familiar to the Blizzard of 1999.  A lot of us still remember slogging through piles and piles of snow during the Snowpocalypse.  But for those of us who've been around for a while, there is another year that looms large in the snow memories of Chicagoans, and that year is 1979.

     On January 13 of that year, the city was still trying to dig itself out from under 10 inches of snow that had fallen on New Year's Eve.  Those efforts were not helped at all by the fact that the city would be deluged with another 18.8 inches of snow over the next two days, including a record 16.5 inches just on the 13th.  This hindered many facets of the city, but most notably it impacted the efficiency of the CTA.  Several of the El cars were outfitted with plows that were capable of dealing with up to a foot of snow.  However, the combined total of 27 inches on the ground proved too much for the plows and the CTA had to think on their feet.  What they came up with was actually quite ingenious, and it consisted of cross-layered plywood planks up to 6" thick, which nicely circumvented the problem of running metal over the third rail.  The new plow cars were then released into the system, where they started clearing snow.  One hitch in the system proved to be the grade-level tracks, which were so clogged with snow that they improvised plows didn't so much clear the snow away as just pushed it under the car, which led to the majority of the snow actually being cleared away by the undercarriage of each car.  This wear and tear, along with the presence of salt on the rails, contributed to enhanced wear and tear on the motors of each car, which led to almost all of the motors blowing out within the next year.  The immediate toll on the CTA was burdensome as well, since some of the tracks didn't completely thaw out until the middle of March.  Beyond that, some lines didn't even recover mediocre levels of service until the end of January.

     The CTA was far from the only city department affected, with ripples being felt everywhere from the lack of plowing efficiency in the city, from the Fire and Police departments, to the streets team, to everybody in between.  Including Mayor Michael Bilandic.  Many folks blamed the ineptitude of the city's response on him(and it certainly didn't help when he gave an obtusely ham-handed response to the critics.)  His prime political opponent at the time was a woman by the name of Jane Byrne(who had been his colleague in the first Daley Administration), and Byrne took full advantage of this, because guess what?  1979 was an election year, and the primary was held less than a month and a half after the Blizzard.  Byrne managed to oust Bilandic, and went on to win the General Election.  Her administration featured typical Chicago business, the beginning of a legacy that still goes on every summer, and NO BLIZZARDS.