The monster cold wave swept into Northeast Pennsylvania behind a paralyzing snowstorm, a deep, frigid blast unlike anything before or since. For three days in 1994 - Jan. 19, 20, and 21 - numbing cold ruled.
Schools shut down. Local, state and federal government offices closed. Businesses curtailed hours. The governor declared a state of emergency. PPL pleaded with customers to conserve electricity, fearing catastrophic blackouts.
And as the temperatures tumbled, so did the weather records. The high on Jan. 19 at the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport peaked at 2 p.m. at 2 degrees below zero, still the coldest maximum temperature locally in 113 years of record-keeping.
Less than 48 hours later, on the morning of Jan. 21, the temperature at the airport dipped to 21 below zero. That is the all-time low and a full six degrees colder than any low recorded in the intervening 20 years.
If that weren't enough, January 1994 would establish itself as the snowiest month ever in Northeast Pennsylvania, with a total snowfall of 42.3 inches.
"That was when winter was winter," joked AccuWeather meteorologist Dave Dombek.
Although the area shivered through three days with sub-zero lows over a six-day span earlier this month, Dombek said it is difficult to appreciate how intensely cold it was during that three-day stretch two decades ago unless you were there.
"It was a long siege," he said.
The week had already been unusually chilly, with lows of zero on Jan. 15 and 4 degrees below zero on Jan. 16. After a modest warm-up on Jan. 17, when a winter storm walloped the region with more than 16 inches of fresh snow, the temperature started dropping, hitting 6 degrees below zero late on Jan. 18.
Then it kept falling.
By 8 a.m. on Jan. 19, the mercury bottomed out at 13 degrees below zero, but the temperature never rose above 2 below zero the rest of the day.
The next day, Jan. 20, a new record low was established when the temperature at the airport fell to 9 degrees below zero at 5:30 a.m. The record lasted less than 18 hours. After the temperature climbed to 13 by mid-afternoon, it fell to 11 below at 11 p.m., setting what remains the record low for the date.
It didn't stop there.
By 4 a.m. on Jan. 21, the temperature was 16 below. At 7:45 a.m., it slid to 21 below. That eclipsed the previous historic low of 19 below on Feb. 9, 1934.
Dombek said momentum contributed to the 21 below reading.
"Everything that could go right to get that record cold happened that January. You were building up a deeper and deeper snowpack. You were getting one arctic air mass after another coming down and you figured one of those nights would coincide with having light winds and clear skies," he said. "It did, and that is what set it up."
As he reviewed the temperature records from the period, Dave Nicosia, warning coordination meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Binghamton, N.Y., said what stands out is the duration of the extremes.
In addition to a full day-plus when the temperature did not climb above 2 below, there were four consecutive days with lows below zero and three with readings of at least 11 below.
"That is tremendously cold," Nicosia said.
Pregnant with her second child, Laurie Cadden was scheduled for a Caesarean section at Community Medical Center on the morning of Jan. 21.
"It's bizarre, because I remember everything so vividly. The night before it was freezing cold, but we went out to Preno's for spaghetti and meatballs," she said. "I remember just the freezing of your breath and how you could hear your footsteps as you walked because everything crunched. It was just so weird."
The next morning, she bundled up and headed to CMC at 5:45.
"I mean, you never want to go to the hospital, but I couldn't wait to get there," Cadden said. "It was freezing - freezing!"
Retired Keystone College professor Thomas G. Cupillari said the most extreme cold he recalls was one day in January 1968 when he recorded a low on the LaPlume campus of 23 below, which was significantly colder than the official low at the airport that day. He remembers the 1994 cold spell but not with the same clarity.
"In cases like this, it all points up to the fact it is pretty darn cold," he said.
A ringing telephone awakened Rich Beasley, northeast regional affairs director for PPL Electric Utilities, at his home about 5:30 a.m. on Jan. 19.
PPL, along with the PJM Interconnection regional consortium of which it was a part, had set records for electricity usage the previous evening as temperatures plummeted, and a dispatcher was calling to tell Beasley the utility needed to "shed load" as demand on the system approached capacity.
"Get over here," he recalled the dispatcher saying. "It looks as if we are going to have to resort to some rolling blackouts."
Beginning just after 7 a.m., PPL temporarily cut service to 7,800 customers across a swath of Lackawanna, Luzerne and Monroe counties. As the day wore on, there were more interruptions, eventually impacting about 25,000 area customers. Each of the outages lasted about 30 minutes.
The rolling blackouts were PPL's first in more than 20 years.
The utility's status remained tenuous for next two days - Jan. 20 and 21 - but no additional outages were necessary as people heeded a request to conserve, Beasley said. PPL hasn't had to resort to rolling blackouts in the 20 years since.
Beasley credited PPL customers who voluntarily turned back their thermostats and otherwise reduced their electricity use with heading off a far more serious situation.
"Absolutely," he said. "If it wasn't for customers who curtailed their use, the planned rolling blackouts could have turned into unplanned massive blackouts. That would have been bad."
From a meteorological standpoint, January 1994 would have been a landmark month even without the record cold.
At least a trace of snow fell on 25 of the 31 days that month, including major snowfalls of 8.9 inches on Jan. 4 and 16.4 inches on Jan. 17. There was a record 27 inches of snow on the ground when the cold wave hit.
On Jan. 25, a 1.6-inch snowfall pushed the monthly total to 38.1 inches, beating the 38 inches that fell in March 1916 and making the month the snowiest on record. By the end of January, total snowfall would reach 42.3 inches, establishing a record that still stands.
"It was just an insane month - lots of snow, lots of cold," Nicosia said. "The winter itself wasn't horribly cold, but the amount of snow was just crazy. You combine the cold and the snow, and it was one of the worst."
Cadden's son, Sean Cadden Foley, now a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, will celebrate his 20th birthday on Tuesday.
His mother likes to joke with him about circumstances of his birth.
"He is the warmest kid you would ever want to meet, but he was born on the coldest day - that's what I tell him," Cadden said. "I will never forget, for obvious reasons, but that cold? It was unbelievable."