THE GREAT ABASHIRI
SNOWSTORM OF 1957

Fred Young
Radar Maintenance, Site 28, Abashiri
848th AC&W Squadron


As far as I know, I am the only person to have experienced both the great Abashiri snowstorm and fire of March 1957 and the devastation of Floridas Hurricane Andrew in August 1992.

The Abashiri snowstorm was absolutely the worst I ever saw. It started with a light but steady snowfall on Saturday, March 9 and went on until the following Sunday eight days later. I remember it like it was yesterday.

I was getting ready to go on leave to Sapporo, Misawa and Tokyo and had withdrawn $195 from the Orderly Room safe and secured it in my barracks locker. I went to bed Wednesday night with the snow still coming down and was sound asleep about 1:30 in the morning when someone burst into the barracks yelling, Fire, fire, and turned on the lights.

Smoke was billowing up from the top portion of the wall which separated the living area from the latrine. I grabbed a fire extinguisher and opened the latrine door. All I could see were flames and smoke. The fire extinguisher did little to stop the fire so I ran out into the Jamesway, which connected the five barracks buildings, in my long johns, cotton socks and Japanese slippers. Someone tried to use the local fire hydrant but it was frozen.

Staff Sergeant James Vreedenberg, from Operations, knew how to operate a CAT but the only one available was red-lined for repairs. Somehow he got it started and knocked down the Jamesway, which kept the fire from spreading and burning down the whole site.

But the barracks we were in was totally destroyed and some 20 of us had to crowd into the other two airmens barracks and the NCO barracks with the clothes we were wearing as our only possessions.

As near as anyone could determine, the fire started because the Japanese Civil Engineering workers, who were supposed to clean the stoves, couldnt get to the site because of the snowstorm. Soot accumulated inside the stovepipe in the latrine, ignited, and started the fire.

Meanwhile the snow kept right on falling and then the site started to run out of food. The train with our replenishment rations had made it to the Abashiri train station but there was no way to get the food to our site from the town, because of the snow.

Helicopters and an SA-16 from Chitose Air Base made their way through the snow and paradropped enough C-rations, parkas, canvas cots, fire extinguisher refills and other necessities to see us through the crisis.

Finally, on Sunday, March 17, more than a week after it started and with nearly 170 inches of new snow on the ground, the storm came to an end.

Those of us who were in the barracks that burned had to go to Chitose and file claims. I think I got back about $350 for my clothes, camera, and the $195 I had placed in my locker. I never did get to go on leave to Sapporo, Misawa and Tokyo.

Along with the snowstorm and the fire, another thing that remains vividly in my mind was an incident that happened one day while I was on duty in radar maintenance. Sergeant Vreedenberg called me into Operations and told me he was perplexed because they had just tracked something that went across the upper portion of their PPI (Plan Position Indicator), traveling from the northwest to the southeast a course that covered 225 miles in 15 seconds! Then it disappeared off the edge of the scope.

I checked out the PPI with our test parameters. Everything worked fine. This information was forwarded to ADCC at Misawa, which promptly informed us that we had a malfunction in our equipment because nothing could travel that fast.

Ten days later we were visited by a security officer from Misawa who interrogated everyone about what we had seen. When he departed, his final words were, Remember, what you see here stays here. Years later I came to the conclusion that what we had tracked was a Russian missile that had gone awry and never achieved cruising altitude.