The New Year Blizzard of 1962/63
Based on newspaper reports of the day.

The Blizzard of 1962–63

In the final days of December 1962, Waterford lay beneath a sullen sky. Christmas had come and gone, leaving behind its familiar mixture of quiet contentment and post-festive weariness. Few could have imagined what nature was about to unleash. Old men remembered 1947, when the snow came and stayed, smothering the land for weeks. They spoke of it in shop queues and at firesides, but there was a general sense that such winters belonged to another age. Ireland was modernising, electricity was extending further into the countryside, and though post-war austerity was not long behind, a new decade had begun with a spirit of optimism. That optimism, however, would soon be tested.

Meteorologists later explained that the pattern was eerily similar to fifteen years earlier: a massive high-pressure system stretched like an invisible wall from Greenland across Scandinavia, dragging with it the bitter air of Siberia and the Arctic. On Saturday, December 29th, a spokesman from the Meteorological Office announced that the cold would continue for another day. 

As dawn broke on Sunday, December 30th, the wind sharpened. It came first as a biting breeze, then as a steady gale, rattling window panes and whistling through the cracks of doors. By mid-morning, the snow began to fall — not in gentle flakes, but in sheets, horizontal and relentless, driven by gale-force winds. It was as if the heavens had decided to draw a curtain across the city and county, plunging the South-East into Arctic conditions.

Within hours, the familiar patterns of life collapsed. Cars were abandoned on city streets and country roads alike, wheels spinning uselessly in the deepening drifts. Bus services faltered, then failed altogether. A C.I.E. inspector, hardened by decades of service, would later describe it as the worst day he had seen in thirty years. The road at Youghal Bridge was blocked entirely, the snow piled high, indifferent to man’s machines.

By afternoon, Waterford was unrecognisable. The snow lay six inches deep in the city itself, but in the countryside, where the winds swept unhindered, it gathered into monstrous drifts — three, four, even ten feet high. Lanes disappeared, hedgerows were buried, and familiar landmarks were rendered ghostly and strange beneath a white mantle. The city streets, rarely empty, took on an eerie silence. The little traffic that had ventured out compressed the snow into a slick surface, creating conditions likened to a skating rink. Pedestrians slipped and stumbled, clinging to walls and railings. As dusk fell, the frost tightened its grip, and Waterford, like so many towns and villages across the South-East, was locked in ice.

Daily Life Upended

Sunday was a day of disruption, and the ordinary joys of a winter weekend vanished into the storm. For children, there was wonder in it. The snow, deep and untamed, transformed fields into playgrounds, hills into slides, and familiar lanes into frozen wonderlands. But for their parents, the practical realities loomed large. Bread, milk, and coal were the currency of comfort, and already fears began to stir that supplies would run short if the roads remained impassable.

The Struggle of the Workers

Behind the scenes, a different drama played out. While most citizens huddled indoors, key workers braved the elements. The men of the E.S.B. and the Post Office trudged into the gale, shouldering their responsibilities. C.I.E. bus drivers, postmen, delivery men — all were suddenly cast as frontline defenders in a battle with nature. The Munster Express would later remark that the public often takes such efforts for granted, forgetting that behind every restored light or delivered letter lies a human story of hardship and endurance. In those days at the turn of 1962, these men spared themselves nothing. They went without meals, working irregular hours, determined to keep the arteries of the city and county open, however tenuously.

Rivers of Slush

By Monday morning, December 31st, a temporary thaw gave a false promise of relief. The snow melted into rivers of brown slush, ankle-deep in the streets. Villages and towns wallowed in the muck, their roads no less impassable for the change. In fact, the thaw only deepened the misery, as ice returned with the night. The Automobile Association reported that the New Ross–Dublin road was blocked. The traditional New Year’s Day crowds from Wexford, who usually flocked into Waterford, were absent that year, stranded in their own parishes.

An Unforgiving Cold

The storm was not simply an inconvenience; it was a threat to life and livelihood. Power failures struck across the county, leaving families huddled around open fires for warmth. Outages spread beyond the city into the countryside, and repair crews struggled through the snowdrifts to restore service. The hardship was severe, yet the sense of resilience was greater still.

The people of Waterford did not yet know it, but this was only the beginning. The days that followed would bring stories of buses buried in drifts, fishermen stranded, away from their harbours, newspaper men marooned in snowbound villages, and communities forced to take to open boats and tractors to secure their daily bread.

Saved by a Whistle – A Postman’s Escape from the Snow

On the slopes of Brandon Hill, near Graiguenamanagh in County Kilkenny, the snow nearly claimed the life of a rural postman, Mr. John Coady of High Street.

That winter’s day, with the roads impassable, Mr. Coady pressed on with his deliveries. Determined to reach the farmhouses scattered along the hillside, he chose a short cut across a field, the usual roadway being buried under snow. Halfway across, he headed towards what he thought was a gateway when suddenly the ground gave way beneath him. In an instant, he sank into a drift six feet deep.

Snow engulfed him, and the cold closed in quickly. Struggling to move, Mr. Coady did the only thing he could: he raised his whistle to his lips and blew with all the strength he had left.

By chance, the sharp sound carried across the muffled, silent fields to the ears of a nearby farmer. Realising someone was in grave danger, the farmer set out immediately, forcing his way through the drifts, each step an effort. Guided by the faint blasts of the whistle, he finally reached the postman, who by then was almost buried.

At great personal risk, the farmer pulled Mr. Coady out of the drift and brought him back to the safety of his farmhouse. Thanks to the whistle and the courage of a neighbour, a tragedy was narrowly averted.

The Blizzard had announced itself with full force, and its grip would not easily be broken. 

A City at a Standstill

By New Year’s Eve morning, Waterford was a city brought to its knees. The storm that had swept in on Sunday did not pass with the night, but instead left behind a crippled network of roads, rail, and communication lines. Daily life, so often taken for granted, was halted in its tracks.

The centre of Waterford bore the look of a stage set abandoned after a performance. Normally busy streets lay silent. Only a few brave souls picked their way cautiously through the ankle-deep slush that had replaced Sunday’s pristine snow. Those who ventured out soon found that the thaw was deceptive. Ice lay beneath the brown muck, turning every step into a gamble. Motor cars, abandoned the previous evening, remained stranded on roads and laneways, frozen in place. Their owners trudged long distances home through the storm and now faced the prospect of days without transport. The old Waterford–Dunmore road, lifeline to the fishing village and the coast, was entirely blocked.

The Human Cost of Isolation

For families, the snowstorm cut more deeply than simply preventing a day’s journey. It disrupted the most sacred rhythms of life. On that final Sunday of the year, many parishes saw only half their congregation, and in some churches the doors remained unopened. The faithful could not reach the pews, the bells rang to half-empty streets. Evening devotions, a mainstay in towns and villages, were cancelled outright. Social life, too, withered. The Olympia Ballroom, normally thronged, was quiet. Football matches were abandoned, and coursing meetings postponed. It was as though the county had been pressed into silence.

The Collapse of Power

The storm struck hardest at the systems that bound the county together. By early Monday morning, the situation had worsened dramatically. Ferrybank and the rural district of Polerone, stretching as far south as Glenmore, lost supply entirely. The scale of the problem was daunting. Lines had collapsed between Waterford and Ballyhale, between Ballyhale and Kilkenny, and between New Ross and Wexford. Thomastown, Graiguenamanagh, and wide swathes of County Waterford lay powerless.

The greatest drama came late on Monday night. At nine o’clock, word spread of disaster at Sallypark. A high-tension cable, spanning the Suir for thirty-three years, had collapsed. The conductor had broken free from the Mount Misery side and, with a sound described as an explosion, crashed across the C.I.E. goods yard. The sight was terrifying — a half-ton cable, alive with current, flung across the tracks. It was miraculous that no one was killed. The Express Dublin to Waterford train, approaching the city, was forced to halt. For an hour, passengers waited in the cold as men worked with utmost care to clear the line. The danger was immense. At the height of the outage, an estimated 15,000 homes and businesses in the district were without electricity. With many roads blocked by massive drifts, the men of the E.S.B. were often forced to travel on foot to carry out their repairs.

By Wednesday, reinforcements had arrived — line gangs from Dundalk, Galway, and Sligo — but even then it was estimated that it would take a month before full service could be restored. Old hands recalled that the E.S.B. had faced hard times in 1947, but never before had the rural hinterlands of Waterford presented such difficulties.

Roads Blocked

The storm also brought the county’s bus services to their knees. Long-distance routes to Cork, Dublin, New Ross, and the coast were abandoned, while city buses operated only partially. Even where buses ran, they could go no further than the lowest reaches of the city.

Perhaps the most vivid story of hardship came on the Waterford to Cork service of Sunday morning. Mr. Pádraig Burke, a C.I.E. driver from Cork Road, set off with his passengers on the 9.15 a.m. run. He drove with extreme caution, but by the time he reached Dungarvan the road ahead was already blocked by towering drifts. Near Conway’s Cross, outside Ardmore, his bus finally became embedded in nine feet of snow. Another bus was dispatched from Waterford, manned by conductor Jimmy Madden of Ard Mhuire, Ferrybank. The rescue took hours. Four long hours were needed to cover the distance back to Conway’s Cross, where the first bus was abandoned.

Of the seven passengers, five had been bound for Cork Airport. Two of them, including a young woman from Lukeswell named Miss Phelan, had been due to fly back to Bristol. Instead, they were returned to Waterford, where C.I.E. secured lodgings for them in the Granville Hotel. The relief bus rolled into the city in the small hours of Monday morning, its passengers exhausted but safe.

Across the county, telephone and telegraph lines failed. Dungarvan, Kilmacthomas, Lismore, and Kill were particularly hard hit. Repair gangs worked without rest to restore communications, but some areas remained cut off for days.

In the middle of it all, four newspaper carriers found themselves stranded in Duncannon. Among them was John Murphy, the well-known taxi proprietor from O’Connell Street, Waterford. Alongside him were Richard Murphy and Hugh Doyle of Graiguenamanagh, and Dermot Hall of Wexford. Their cars were buried in snowdrifts of more than ten feet and could not be dug out for three days. Cut off from his family by failed phone lines, Murphy managed only on Monday morning to get word through that he was safe. With newspapers undelivered, towns and villages from Fethard-on-Sea to Wellington Bridge were left without their Sunday papers.

Not even the clergy were immune. The Reverend Armstrong, a Church of Ireland clergyman, had travelled from Fethard-on-Sea to conduct a service in Duncannon. He, too, found himself marooned, unable to return until Tuesday. Alongside him, a Wexford businessman was forced to remain in the village until mid-week. Such stories, repeated across the South-East, revealed a county held hostage by snow.

Waterford was learning, in the early days of 1963, how fragile the threads of modern life could be. Roads, buses, telegraphs, electricity — each could be undone in an instant by nature’s fury. Yet, even as hardship mounted, the resilience of the people shone through: the driver who steered into the drifts, the linesman who missed his Sunday dinner, the paper carrier who endured three days cut off from home.

And still, greater challenges lay ahead. Dunmore and Passage East were isolated, their fleets sheltering in port. A trawler would sink at the slip. Boats and tractors would be pressed into service for food, and funerals themselves would falter before the snow.

The storm was not finished with Waterford.

Harbours, Boats, and the Sea

While Waterford city struggled with snowbound streets and lack of electricity, the storm’s full cruelty was felt in the county’s fishing villages and river communities. Along the Suir and out on the coast, the blizzard not only brought isolation but threatened the very survival of daily life.

By Monday evening, December 31st, the harbours at Dunmore East and Passage East were cut off entirely. The bus services were cancelled, the mail car from Waterford could go no further. Roads that wound along the headlands and coves disappeared under snow, and in places where the thaw had begun, slush turned to ice almost instantly, leaving the routes as dangerous as before.

Fishing had already ceased the previous Friday. The herring fleet that had bustled in and out of Dunmore throughout December sought refuge upriver in Waterford Port. Their crews remained stranded in the city, unable to return home to their families along the South-East coast. For those who depended on the sea, every lost day was a lost wage, and the stillness of the tied-up fleet was a sombre sight.

Not all vessels escaped the storm unscathed. On the morning of Sunday, December 30th, the Provid, a fishing boat owned by Eddie Don — an English journalist and fisherman who had settled at the Pink Cottage in Dunmore — sank off the slip. Though mercifully no lives were lost, the sinking served as a grim reminder of how treacherous the harbour could be when winds reached gale force and snow swept in from the east.

Trawlers collide off Dunmore East

Also on the same morning, the crew of the Dunmore East based herring trawler, Christmas Mornin, skippered by John Doyle, had a narrow escape from serious injury when their vessel was in collision with a deep-sea French trawler outside Dunmore East pier.

The accident occurred as the Christmas Mornin was on her way out of Dunmore dock and the French trawler was approaching Dunmore, where she planned to take shelter for the night.

Although badly damaged, the Christmas Mornin returned to Dunmore East and later travelled up the River Suir to Waterford, where repairs will be carried out. The French trawler suffered no damage. At least eight planks on the port side of the Christmas Mornin were smashed.

None of the crew suffered injury. It turned out that neither of the skippers saw each other with the big seas running and the blinding rain.

Ships Run For Cover

Out at sea, the conditions were equally dire. Cargoes of potash and coal from the Continent, destined for Waterford, were delayed. The easterly gale, force eight on the Beaufort scale, left the sea in turmoil. Ships waiting to make landfall were forced to shelter in the English Channel and the Mersey Estuary. In a county still so dependent on coal for warmth, the absence of these cargoes weighed heavily on families who saw their stocks running low as the year turned.

If the harbours felt the storm’s fury, the villages along the Suir endured a different but no less severe trial. With the roads buried under drifts and supplies running thin, boatmen from Passage East, Cheekpoint, Duncannon, and Ballyhack took to the river itself. In open craft, they rowed upriver to Waterford, braving sleet, gales, and bitter cold to fetch food.

It is easy to imagine the scene: the river black and swollen, the snow blinding, men bent low to their oars as the storm lashed around them. Each pull was an act of determination, each mile upriver a victory against the elements. In Waterford city, they gathered flour, bread, and milk, stowed what they could, and turned for home. On the quays that evening, families waited anxiously, children clutching their mothers’ hands, until the boats came into view once more — supplies secured, spirits restored.

Elsewhere, tractors became the lifelines of rural parishes. In East Waterford and around Dunmore and Passage, farmers turned their engines into delivery wagons. Trailers piled with bread and milk rattled over frozen lanes, the sound of chains on tyres announcing their approach. It was a reminder that, by the early 1960s, tractors were replacing horses in the Irish countryside — and in the blizzard, their strength proved essential.

Even the most solemn duties were not spared. Funerals in both city and county were disrupted. In some places, coffins were carried by hand from house to church when no hearse could pass. Elsewhere, tractors pulled funeral carts across the frozen ground. The storm showed no respect for ritual, but communities adapted, ensuring their dead were honoured even in the harshest of conditions.

Yet the blizzard’s toll was not only practical. It was cultural too. For in the days that followed, Waterford’s music, theatre, and sport also fell silent under the snow.

A Frozen Culture

If the blizzard crippled the roads and darkened the power lines, it also froze the very pulse of community life. In Waterford, as in so many Irish towns, music, theatre, and sport were not luxuries but the glue that held people together through long winters. When the snow came, it silenced these rhythms as surely as it silenced the streets.

The Olympia Ballroom, the city’s great temple of music, stood dark. For the first time in its history, a dance was cancelled on Sunday, December 30th. The Capitol Showband, booked to play, could not make the journey from Dublin. Even had they arrived, few dancers would have braved the treacherous streets to hear them. On New Year’s Eve, the Capitol remained absent, and though the Fleetwoods Showband of Waterford filled the breach, the crowds were small, the mood subdued. The New Year came in quietly, without the usual swell of music and laughter.

Tradition, too, faltered. The Erin’s Hope Prize Flute Band, which had paraded through the city on New Year’s Eve for as long as anyone could remember, laid down their instruments. The icy streets made marching impossible. The absence of their fife and drum was keenly felt, for to many citizens, the sound of that band was the true marker of the year’s end. Its silence left the night oddly hollow.

At the Theatre Royal, the pantomime Sinbad the Sailor was forced to cancel both its Sunday matinee and evening performance, along with Monday night’s show. For children, it was a cruel disappointment. The pantomime was a highlight of Christmas, its riot of colour and humour a treasured memory in the making. Though performances resumed by Tuesday, with an extra matinee added to make up the loss, the break in continuity was a reminder that even the stage could not defy the storm.

The Hunt Ball Postponed

Perhaps the most symbolic cancellation was the Waterford Hunt Ball, scheduled for Wednesday, January 2nd, in the Olympia Ballroom. A fixture of the county’s social calendar, it drew riders, farmers, and townsfolk alike. Its postponement was more than an inconvenience — it was a sign that the blizzard had reached into the very heart of Waterford’s traditions, still strong in a county where the Hunt carried deep cultural weight.

Sport, too, lay buried. The Waterford–Drumcondra league tie at Kilcohan Park was cancelled, as were all matches in the Waterford and District League. In Dungarvan, a two-day coursing meeting was postponed twice. Road races planned by St. Mary’s Athletic Club were abandoned despite strong entries from across Munster. Across the county, pitches lay invisible beneath snow, their goalposts jutting like skeletal markers above the drifts.

Bread Vans Blocked

Even the basic act of securing bread became entangled with the storm. Modern Bakeries’ depot in Tramore was struck by fire on Tuesday, compounding the crisis. Bread vans struggled to reach their destinations, one driver managing only to reach New Ross before turning back. Entire villages went without deliveries, making do with what they had in their cupboards.

For Waterford’s journalists, the blizzard became not just a story to report but an obstacle to their work. A Munster Express reporter set out to reach mid and west Waterford, only to find telephones down and roads impassable. It was not until later in the week that he managed to make contact with Dungarvan and Lismore. What he found was bleak: vast areas cut off, roads blocked by drifts ten to twelve feet high, power supplies severed, even tractors unable to force a passage.

The picture he painted recalled 1947: travellers snowbound, villages isolated, families cut off in silence. In 1963, as in that earlier storm, the harshest lessons came not just from the snow itself but from the sudden absence of all the small gatherings, entertainments, and fixtures that kept life going. The storm had frozen more than water — it had frozen culture itself.

Aftermath and Legacy

By Wednesday, January 2nd, Waterford had endured three full days of disruption, and though the snow had eased, the scale of the hardship was clear. Roads remained impassable in many places, particularly along the Waterford–Cork route at Pike Hill. Rural deliveries of post and goods were erratic at best. Dungarvan, already reeling from isolation, was dealt another blow when an electrical fault struck the pumps supplying the town with water. Repair crews worked late into the night to restore service.

For farmers, the storm was disastrous. Sheep were feared lost beneath the drifts, their bodies hidden until the thaw. Chickens and pigs, raised in electrically heated houses, perished when the power failed. Apples stored for the winter rotted as humidity controls broke down. Across the countryside, worry hung as heavy as the clouds above. The land that sustained families had suddenly turned hostile.

Commerce, too, was shaken. With coal cargoes delayed at sea, households faced dwindling supplies for their grates. Shops struggled to keep bread and milk on their shelves. Businesses dependent on power were forced to close, their customers left waiting. Even as the thaw brought rivers of brown slush through the streets, the county was left counting its losses.

The comparisons with 1947 were on everyone’s lips. Then, too, the snow had fallen, thawed, frozen, and fallen again, leaving Ireland paralysed for weeks. The Munster Express reprinted its own coverage from that year, reminding readers how history had a way of repeating itself. Yet there was a sense that 1963 had struck harder, precisely because life had become more dependent on modern systems — electricity, motor transport, refrigeration — that proved fragile when tested.

The first blizzard of ’63 became a chapter of shared memory, spoken of in families for decades after. It was a test of endurance that revealed the vulnerability of modern life, yet also the strength of ordinary people. The boatmen rowing against the gale, the linesmen trudging through drifts, the bus drivers coaxing their vehicles through snow, the families who carried coffins by hand to churchyards — all played their part in a story of resilience.

1963 turned out to be one of the coldest years on record, with many snowstorms over the winter months. The New Year storm prepared people, and they coped better with those that followed.

The snow may have frozen the streets, darkened the lights, and silenced the music, but it did not break Waterford. When the thaw finally came, it left behind not only damage and loss but also tales of grit and neighbourly courage. In the long memory of the county, the winter of 1963 endures as one of its defining moments — a time when the world seemed frozen in place, yet the spirit of Waterford refused to be subdued.