One of Birmingham’s Coldest Mornings Ever…

On Saturday, January 19, 1985, I was a newly minted Front Office Manager at the Sheraton Perimeter on Highway 280. It was a sunny day, with temperatures in the middle 50s. It was hard to believe the weather reports that called for an inch of snow and temperatures falling like a rock. I assembled a snow team and moved into the hotel for the night so we would be ready for the anticipated travel problems the next morning.

The powerful cold front moved through overnight. I believe thunderstorms were associated with the front and there was about an inch of post frontal snowfall. We woke up on Sunday morning with an inch of snow on the ground and temperatures in the deep freeze. The temperature plunged from a high of 55F at Birmingham on Saturday afternoon to a morning low of 13F. The low at Nashville was -7F. Within a couple of hours in Birmingham, readings had plunged into the single digits and would remain there all day. The high temperature at Muscle Shoals never got above zero that day.

It was Super Bowl Sunday and a big concern was that the cable kept going out intermittently. But a bigger concern developed as the day went on. A low coolant temperature alarm from the generator sounded repeatedly. Even as we worried about that problem, the fire alarm began to sound because of heat detectors in the elevator penthouse that were triggering false alarms because of the extreme cold.

After a sleepless night monitoring the fire alarm system, about 6 a.m., a loud bell started sounding. The sprinkler alarm. Water quickly began flooding the lobby from Park Place, the hotel nightclub that was supposed to open that week. An uninsulated sprinkler pipe in the ceiling of the nightclub had frozen and burst. That was just one of many pipes that burst that morning across Central Alabama. Plumbers were busy answering calls from worried residents who had no water, a sure sign of frozen pipes.

Overnight lows across the state included: 3F at Mobile, 0F at Montgomery and -6F at Birmingham. It was -8F at Pinson, -10F at Jasper and -11F at both Huntsville and Muscle Shoals.

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