So we had a bunch of snow in Seattle yesterday. A "bunch" here is just a few inches, but with a city that's not prepared, filled with drivers equally so, that can be more than enough to shut things down. And guess what? That's exactly what happened.
First, some pictures (not mine): The fun began in an anticlimactic sort of way. On Sunday night, the weather reports were wishy-washy. Would we get snow? Would we not? No one was sure. Turns out that we did get some, but it melted before the morning commute was underway. During the workday, snow would intermittently fall, but nothing seemed to stick. People gazed at the snow outside of their windows, and then got back to work.
Then, around 5pm, the bottom fell out. Tons of snow started falling, and sticking. Cars filled the streets and packed down the snow into sheets of ice. Soon, cars were spinning out and traffic came to a halt. On the way out from work, I helped push a car that was having trouble climbing up a rather shallow hill. Looking back, I saw a long lineup of cars waiting to meet this same hill, one after the other. I didn't stick around to see who else would end up being stuck.
I thought I was being smart by taking the bus in the morning. "Surely," I thought, "surely the buses will be prepared to truck folks home in this inclement weather." The short answer: they weren't. The buses didn't have chains on them, and it took hours to deliver the chains to the buses before they could commence their trucking.
After about an hour and half of waiting outside in the cold, snowy weather, a generous soul came by and offered a ride to those going to his neighborhood...my neighborhood! I hitched a ride along with two others. Fortunately the guy had a 4-wheel-drive car, so I felt pretty good about our chances of getting home without incident. Now, you'd think that we'd be home in no time, right? Wrong. It took 30 minutes to get from the parking deck to the highway, all because of traffic jams. Once on the highway, things were eerily fine; sure, there was snow on the road, but there was very light traffic. We arrived in our neighborhood about 15 minutes after hitting the highway, happy to finally have returned home.
Sound bad? Actually, we were some of the more lucky commuters yesterday. Another guy on my team took 4 hours to get from work to home (a trip that likely takes 20 or so minutes, usually), in large part to the other drivers who couldn't navigate the snow and ice. Even worse, I heard of one person who lives in Lynnwood that left work at 5pm, and arrived at 4am. That's right - 11 hours of wintery commuting hell.
The moral of this story? The only one I could glean was: at the sign of a snowstorm with accumulation, leave early. Someone that left before the 5pm downpour got home in a matter of minutes. Ah, hindsight: I shake my fist at thee!
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