You’ll Tell Your Kids About The January 2019 Winter Storm – Let’s Give It A Name!

The winter weather event that spanned the last week of January 2019 in Michigan was historic. Heavy snow and areas of Lake effect snow were followed by some insanely coldest temperatures and extreme wind chills that we hadn't seen in decades.

It will be one of those "Remember where you were when..." type events you will look back on and talk about years from now. So we are going to name the storm.

Here are the nominations from several of our digital contributors. Voting will end on Monday, February 11th and then we will announce the winning name.

Here are a few reasons we believe this storm is worthy of receiving one of those long-standing nicknames, like "Blizzard of '78":

• The Governor of Michigan declared a state of emergency 
• Michigan State University closed for two days. Prior to that, MSU had only closed six times in its history 
• The U.S. Postal Service canceled mail delivery for two days
• Hundreds of Michigan schools were closed for an entire week along with dozens of government offices
• Dozens of rescues were made throughout the state
• During the coldest stretch, temps were below 0 for at least 36 hours straight 
• Record lows were shattered reaching near -20 degrees, wind chills reached -40
• It already has its own Wikipedia page
• An EAS Alert was sent out for people to reduce heat because Consumer's Energy faced a potential natural gas shortage 

We seem to be running behind on this. Why? The state of Minnesota has already named the storm and are apparently selling T-shirts about it.