HISTORIC COLD: Record low temperatures invaded northern Ohio 19 years ago this week

CLEVELAND - Where were you 19 years ago Saturday? Few events in our lifetime deserve to be remembered this way. But the monster Arctic Outbreak of January 1994 is one of those events.

Twitter friend @Momster328 has this 1994 memory: "my furnace continually running and the thermostat never reaching 55F."

Most people, who lived through it, remember it in some way.

Says Twitter friend @sebastianboy  "(I) remember it well, got up to take a shower & pipes were frozen!"

An unusually cold & large area of high pressure from the Arctic dropped southward across the Great Lakes, the Ohio and Tennessee Valley all the way to the Gulf Coast. At 2 a.m. on Jan. 18, the temperatures across Northern Ohio dropped below zero degrees F. They did not rise above zero degrees again until a full 56 hours later, at 10 on Jan. 20. That's the longest we've stayed below zero during modern record keeping!

Twitter friend @lj523 added:  "my son was born 1-12-94 and we had just brought him home from the hospital a few days before that cold hit."

In between, new all-time record lows were set across the state. On the morning of Jan. 19, 1994, the temperature at Cleveland Hopkins Airport dropped to a staggering -20 degrees F. That's the coldest ever for Cleveland.

Says Twitter friend @Princess_SaraK5:  "our furnace died that night! We had to put heavy blankets up on the door frames of our one room with its own heater."

It was even colder in Akron and Canton. Temperatures there dropped to -25 degrees F. That too is an all time record low! What's even more astounding: in Millersburg, Ohio, in quiet Holmes County, one thermometer measured an unbelievable -35 degrees F! These record lows still stand today.

Twitter friend @question10: "I still remember 3 cars in our driveway and not a one would start!"

The cold reached all the way down to Texas and Florida where major damage was done to the citrus crops. The Ohio River froze for the first time since 1978.

Twitter friend @coreyann wrote "thanks to that stretch I didn't have to take exams my Freshman year of High School. Bless that cold snap!  LOL!"

Here are some of the record lows on Jan. 19, 1994:

Findlay, OH = -20
Wooster, OH = -24
Elyria, OH = -22
Medina, OH = -26
Ravenna, OH = -25
Chardon, OH = -23
Jefferson, OH = -28
Youngstown, OH = -22
Ashland, OH = -23
Millersburg, OH = -35
New Philadelphia = -22
Dover, OH = -22
Painesville, OH = -19
Oberlin, OH = -23
Lorain, OH = -22
Akron, OH = -25
Canton, OH = -25