New Orleans experienced a rare white Christmas in 1916, but few residents were rejoicing. That's because the city was peppered with damaging chunks of hail, as well as torrential rain that flooded sidewalks and streets. As far as the local newspapers could tell, it was the first time hail had fallen in the city on Christmas.
Severe weather hadn't been in the forecast, according to The Times-Picayune. The paper's reporter seemed downright miffed by that fact, judging by a Dec. 26, 1916, story that was probably a lot for readers to process if they had celebrated hard on the holiday.
"'Partly cloudy' was the Weather Bureau forecast for Christmas Day," the paper wrote. "It was partly cloudy, but the bureau failed to say which part would be cloudy. It was cloudy, not only partly cloudy, but cloudy was the biggest part of the day. But it was more than cloudy. Hail, rain, fog, dampness, thunder and lightning and almost every kind of weather. Even snow, but the snow was on the whiskers of Old Santa Claus on the Christmas trees, on the Christmas calendars, and in the specially decorated holiday show windows."
The size of the hail was "hardly ever equaled," wrote the Item newspaper, but just how big it was is unclear. The Picayune seemed to want to compare it to chicken's eggs, but the matter was complicated.
"No one reported hailstones as big as hen's eggs, for there were no eggs to measure by," the paper wrote. "They were all used up the night before in making eggnog. Anyway, hen's eggs like the maker's loaves have been getting smaller, so it seems, and cannot be used as a standard of measurement any longer."
Whether it was the first hailstorm on Christmas was also hard to confirm. The paper's dutiful reporter made a telephone call to "the oldest inhabitant of the city" to ask about storms of Christmases past, "but the oldest inhabitant had been put to bed at 4 a.m. in no condition to remember anything, even hail on Christmas Day."
The Daily States, an afternoon paper that later merged with the Item, wrote a straighter story, reliant on statistics gleaned from the Sewerage & Water Board. It said 1,936,677,500 gallons of rain had fallen on the city in a period of nine hours, said to be a record deluge. Between 3:15 p.m. and 3:45 p.m. on Christmas Day, more than two inches of rain was measured. In one five-minute span, 0.84 of an inch fell, a rate that the paper calculated would have dropped more than 12 inches per hour.
"Many automobiles" were flooded between Howard and Jackson avenues and between Magazine and Rampart streets during the Christmas storm of 1916, according to the Picayune, and the busy Carondelet streetcar line was knocked out of service. A restaurant and shoe store on St. Charles Avenue were damaged by rainwater that seeped in through a leaky roof; hundreds of pairs of shoes were said to be soaked.
But the effects of the storm weren't all negative. Police and hospital reports from Christmas a century ago suggested that the foul weather had curtailed foul behavior. Forty-nine people were hurt in the city "from celebrating in various ways," wrote the Item, including 11 who were shot, and "crimes attributable by the police directly to celebrating the season did not run heavily."
And the flooding, though severe, didn't last long. The Picayune wrote that after the worst of the rain stopped that afternoon, the city's big pumps flushed the water from the streets in less than half an hour.
"Travel was resumed," the paper wrote, "and the face of it all, Christmas celebrations continued."
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