Snowpocalypse Chicago: Lake Shore Drive, Deaths, and Daley’s Response

The Chicago Groundhog Day Blizzard of 2011 buried the city under 21.2 inches of snow between January 31 and February 2, stranded hundreds of motorists overnight on Lake Shore Drive, killed at least seven people in the immediate area, and caused more than $2 billion in losses across the affected region. It remains the city’s third-largest snowstorm on record and its biggest February storm ever measured.¹²

How Much Snow Fell and How Hard the Wind Blew

The storm tracked north out of the southern Plains and intensified over northern Illinois late on January 31. By the afternoon of February 1, snow was coming down across the Chicago area at one to two inches per hour.¹

O’Hare Airport recorded 21.2 inches of total accumulation, with 20.0 inches falling in a single 24-hour period, the highest 24-hour total in the city’s recorded history. Rockford, roughly 90 miles northwest, measured 15.1 inches. Wind gusts hit 70 mph along the Chicago lakefront and 61 mph at O’Hare, exceeding the peak gusts of the historic Chicago blizzards of 1967, 1979, and 1999. Visibility at O’Hare dropped to a quarter mile or less for 11 straight hours. Thundersnow was reported across the region on the evening of February 1, and Midway Airport logged heavy thundersnow with small hail.¹

The 21.2-inch total ranks behind only the January 1967 blizzard (23 inches) and the New Year’s storm of January 1999 (21.76 inches) in Chicago’s all-time snowfall records.³

What Happened on Lake Shore Drive

The lasting image of the blizzard was the mass stranding of vehicles on Lake Shore Drive, the expressway that runs along Chicago’s waterfront. During the evening rush on February 1, whiteout conditions and snowfall rates of one to two inches per hour made the road nearly impassable. Between 7:15 and 7:45 p.m., three separate accidents occurred, including at least one CTA bus that jackknifed across the northbound lanes and sealed the roadway. The drive was officially closed at 7:58 p.m., but by then traffic had already locked up in both directions.⁴

Estimates of trapped vehicles ranged from about 500 to at least 1,500, with hundreds of people stuck inside. Some sat in their cars for up to 12 hours as 60-to-70 mph gusts piled snow around them. More than 130 firefighters, some on snowmobiles, and 100 police officers were deployed to the roadway. The fire department set up a mobile command center and handed out water and granola bars; nearby residents also brought food and drinks to those trapped.⁵⁴

By morning, 185 people had been taken to St. Joseph Hospital for cold exposure. Others were moved onto warming buses or to emergency shelters. The drive stayed closed for 33 hours, and it took the city 48 hours to relocate all 496 stranded vehicles using city tow trucks, private contractors, and heavy-duty wreckers.⁴⁶

Motorists criticized the city for failing to close the road earlier and for sending contradictory messages, telling drivers to leave their vehicles so plows could get through while also telling them to stay put. Commuters described a near-total absence of communication from officials, emergency operators, and bus drivers during the crisis.⁵

Who Died in the Storm

Early reports counted at least seven storm-related deaths in the immediate Chicago region. The National Weather Service later attributed 11 deaths across northern Illinois and northwest Indiana to the blizzard.⁷⁸

Documented victims included a 60-year-old man pulled from Diversey Harbor, the only confirmed fatality within city limits; a 17-year-old and a 43-year-old killed when a semi-truck struck their vehicle in Newton County, Indiana; and at least three men who suffered heart attacks while shoveling snow or working outdoors during the storm.⁷

What Else Shut Down

The storm effectively took the region’s transportation network offline. Both O’Hare and Midway international airports closed. Metra canceled trains and shut down entire commuter rail lines. The CTA Red Line stopped running after switches froze, and CTA buses were among the vehicles immobilized on Lake Shore Drive. Interstate 80 was closed through the south and southwest suburbs, other expressways were reduced to a single lane, and travel bans were imposed in Lake, Kane, and Will counties. Roads in McHenry County were called nearly impassable.⁴

Tens of thousands of ComEd customers lost power. Cook County Jail, the nation’s largest single-site jail, had intermittent outages across virtually all 11 buildings on its 96-acre campus. The maximum-security wing switched to backup generators, boot camp inmates were temporarily relocated, and Sheriff Tom Dart declared a civil emergency, the first in more than 30 years, to redirect staff. Reliable power returned by the morning of February 3.⁹¹⁰

The historic First Baptist Congregational Church at 1613 W. Washington Boulevard suffered a partial roof collapse when 60-to-70 mph gusts drove a spire through the sanctuary roof, sending heavy limestone blocks into the building and onto the street. The church, built between 1869 and 1871, had survived the Great Chicago Fire and was designated a National Landmark in 2006. Its Kimball organ, appraised at over $1 million, was damaged. Repair estimates ranged from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars.¹¹¹²

The Price Tag and the Federal Disaster Declaration

The National Climatic Data Center put total losses from the blizzard at more than $2 billion, with insured losses topping $1.1 billion.² A study by IHS Global Insight estimated the storm cost Illinois roughly $400 million per day, mostly through road closures, canceled flights, and lost business activity, with hourly workers accounting for nearly two-thirds of direct economic losses.¹³ State and local government response and recovery expenses topped $64 million.¹⁴

Governor Pat Quinn activated the State Emergency Operations Center on January 31 and mobilized more than 500 Illinois National Guard troops to assist stranded motorists on the interstates.¹⁵ On February 28, Quinn asked President Barack Obama to declare 60 Illinois counties federal disaster areas. The federal major disaster declaration, FEMA-1960-DR, was issued on March 17, 2011, covering 60 counties for public assistance. The Small Business Administration offered low-interest disaster loans to affected nonprofit organizations.¹⁶

What the City Changed Afterward

Mayor Richard M. Daley, then in his final months in office, urged residents on February 1 to stay indoors. The city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications activated its Emergency Operations Center, increased staffing to 125 percent, deployed 50 snowmobiles for the fire department, and staged CTA buses as warming centers. Over the course of the storm the OEMC held 13 press conferences and issued 20 press releases.⁶

OEMC Director Raymond Orozco, who was also Daley’s chief of staff, argued that first responders faced conditions no one could have anticipated and said “no one” should be “taken to the woodshed.” The city’s own contradictory messaging drew sharp public anger. Daley was reportedly so angry about the Lake Shore Drive fiasco that he needed a day to cool off before appearing publicly, leaving department heads to field questions.⁴

A 12-page After Action Report, released in June 2011, concluded that no individual was to blame for the situation on the drive and called the conditions “extraordinary.” It identified systemic weaknesses instead: communication gaps between the Emergency Operations Center and field personnel, the absence of a coordinated shutdown plan for Lake Shore Drive, and poor information flow to bus drivers via the CTA Control Center.¹⁷⁴

The most visible fix arrived on Lake Shore Drive itself. Construction began in October 2011 on two new median turnarounds at Armitage Avenue and Schiller Street, the first such emergency cutouts on the north end of the road. Before 2011, the only existing median breaks were on the South Side at 35th and 43rd streets. The new cutouts, fitted with removable barriers, were designed to give emergency vehicles an escape route and allow the city to redirect traffic during future storms. The OEMC also installed additional surveillance cameras along the drive and set up improved real-time communication protocols.¹⁸¹⁹

Other recommendations in the report included staging tow trucks along the drive in advance of forecast storms, developing a formal plan for where relocated vehicles would be towed, using CTA buses as warming stations for pedestrians, identifying alternate emergency shelters near CTA stations, and requiring all Emergency Operations Center representatives to receive standardized National Incident Management System training.⁶

Rahm Emanuel, who took office as mayor in May 2011, later acknowledged the infrastructure changes and said the city had “studied” the 2011 fiasco. By March 2013, the city was actively using the new protocols, removing the temporary wall at the Schiller Street median break as a precaution ahead of approaching storms.²⁰¹⁹

Why Daley Did Not Pay a Political Price

In most Chicago blizzards, the political consequences are at least as memorable as the snow. The 2011 storm was an exception, largely because Daley had already announced he would not seek re-election. Asked whether being a candidate would have changed his response, Daley said simply, “No.” Political scientist Paul Green of Roosevelt University told reporters he was confident the incident would not “destroy his legacy” after 22 years in office.²¹

Rahm Emanuel, the frontrunner in the February 2011 mayoral race, declined to attack. He called it “premature to punish anyone for the response to the storm.” Other candidates were less restrained: Carol Moseley Braun criticized the city’s “inadequate planning,” and Miguel del Valle called Daley’s absence from the public eye during the crisis “out of character.”²¹

The restraint stood out because Chicago has a long history of blizzards ending political careers. In 1979, a 38-hour storm dumped 20.3 inches on top of earlier accumulations and paralyzed the city. Mayor Michael Bilandic’s administration botched the response: the CTA bypassed transit stops in predominantly Black neighborhoods to maintain service elsewhere, a former deputy mayor was revealed to have been paid $90,000 for an emergency snow-removal plan that arrived late and was deemed “amateurish,” and city parking lots that Bilandic opened for stranded motorists turned out to be uncleared or locked.²²

Jane Byrne, a former Daley protégée whom Bilandic had fired from his cabinet, challenged him in the Democratic primary on a simple argument: nobody could stop the snow, but poor planning had caused the city to collapse. On February 27, 1979, she beat him by two points, swept the city’s Black wards, and went on to become the first woman to serve as mayor of a major American city.²³

1
National Weather Service. January 31 – February 2, 2011 Blizzard
2
EarthSky. List of Billion-Dollar U.S. Disasters
3
ABC7 Chicago. Chicago Blizzard 2011 and Biggest Snowstorms
4
CBS News Chicago. A Look Back at Chicago’s Groundhog Day Blizzard
5
NBC News. Hundreds Stranded on Lake Shore Drive
6
City of Chicago OEMC. February 2011 Blizzard After Action Report
7
Chicago Tribune. Seven People Appear to Have Died in Blizzard-Related Deaths
8
National Weather Service. Chicago’s Top Four Snowstorms
9
CBS News Chicago. Blizzard Lockdown to Be Removed at County Jail
10
NBC Chicago. Blizzard Unleashes Winter Fury
11
NBC Chicago. Blizzard Damages Chicago Landmark
12
CBS News Chicago. Roof Collapses on Historic Church
13
MLive. What Was Cost of Groundhog Day Blizzard
14
State of Illinois. February 2011 News
15
NBC Chicago. Quinn Activates National Guard for Snow
16
Federal Register. Illinois Disaster IL-00029
17
ABC7 News. Chicago Blizzard After Action Report
18
CBS News Chicago. Lake Shore Drive Construction Begins to Avoid Blizzard Fiasco
19
DNAinfo Chicago. Lake Shore Drive Temporary Wall Removed as City Braces for Big Snow
20
NBC Chicago. Emanuel Has an Idea to Solve the Side Street Snow Removal Puzzle
21
News-Herald. Few Fingers Pointed at Daley for Lake Shore Drive
22
Chicago Magazine. Snowpocalypse Then: How the Blizzard of 1979 Cost the Election for Michael Bilandic
23
WTTW. How the 1979 Chicago Blizzard Cooled a Mayor’s Chances at Re-Election