Seattle: 2010 Olympics bobsled event site
OK, maybe it wasn’t THAT bad this morning.
Or maybe it was.
Up on the vast rise that is Phinney Ridge there was as much as a half-inch of sheer ice lying under an inch of dense yet powdery snow, which led to all sorts of problems getting down the hills of this city. The NE 85th/I-5 interchange was closed due to a jacknifed bus — and THREE MORE BUSES piled up behind it. In addition, there were cars and buses stuck on the sides of roads and streets all over the city.
All told, what is normally a 20 minute Friday commute to the U District took me 1 hour, 20 minutes. And I drove. I can’t imagine how long it’d take on the bus — I saw scores of people waiting at stops for buses that never showed.
Other reports say that Capitol Hill was just as bad, with Madison iced over and buses stuck on Broadway.
My one disappointment is that this took me by such surprise I didn’t have time to launch KILLER ICE SNOW OF DEATH DOOM STORM 2006 last night — or issue a Jim Forman Warning advising people over 200ft to be on the lookout for his hyperbole. Oh well, I guess megastorms take people by surprise sometime, like no one expects a Category 4 hurricane to hit New Orleans and not cause any problems that would require full-scale evacuations or cutting a brush-clearing vacation short to, you know, lead.
So, what’s your KILLER ICE SNOW OF DEATH DOOM STORM 2006 horror story?
Ha ha. Looks like you can’t drive in the snow any better than Vancouverites.
Yesterday was the last day working at my employer, a well-known emergency road service organization. From 4:30AM to 7:30AM, I had to repeatedly explain to distressed commuters that a tow truck would be of no use getting them up or down whatever hill standing between them and their job. Oh yes, let’s just load up the Honda Civic on the back of a flatbed and send all that weight down a slippery hill. What could possibly go wrong?
My only transportation that day was my surplus police motorcycle. Though I remember a great scene in Running Scared where Gregory Hines and Billy Crystal take off down a set of stairs into the snow on a bike like mine, that ice made me too chicken to try to get down Roosevelt at 65th.
Felt pretty silly standing in the perfectly dry sunshine on 2nd and Union, waiting for the bus.
So, I was three hours late to meet my new boss. Who’s from Denver. No sympathy.