A pretty snowflake...then pandelerium!

Apparently, it doesn't snow much here in the DC area. Last night's news called for 1-2 inches of snow today. While I thought how much I would enjoy a snow day today as much as the next guy I knew that little of snow just wouldn't be enough to cancel school.

So I'm in my vehicle this morning just after 7AM at a busy 4-way intersection near our hotel. It's dark, eerily quiet, cold, still, and dry. No snow anywhere in sight. There were probably about 15 cars at each of the four points of the intersection, making a total of 60. All of us were probably doing the same thing--flipping through radio channels and enjoying some coffee while waiting for our turns to go through the light and onto the interstate.

Then it happened. Floating down ever so gently like the feather at the end of Forrest Gump was a single large fluffy snowflake. I watched the snowflake finally land right on the street in the center of the intersection. Every car must have been watching it because at that point, all heck broke loose. In a single second the other 59 drivers skipped past the low setting on their windshield wipers and went straight to the rapid setting. Rolling my window down, the sounds of all those wipers sounded like a herd of wild horses running across the meadow. Not just the front windshield wipers but also the back window as well.

Let me remind you that at this point there had only been that one snowflake. That flake must have sounded like a load of wooden pallets being dropped from a 100 foot crane to these folks, because it seemed to scare the bejesus out of them. Once a lane had a green light the entire line of cars moved forward at about 12 miles an hour, apparently just in case the rest of the blizzard would hit at any moment.

It eventually started snowing a little more steadily but certainly less than two total inches by mid-afternoon, and it was above freezing so it was mostly just wet. Nevertheless, there were over 300 emergency calls from vehicle incidents in the DC area before noon today. Schools let out early, salt trucks were everywhere, and the "snowstorm" was the biggest story in town. In Kansas City, it would have just been an ordinary day.

So while I would not want to traverse on roads in Oklahoma and other parts of the midwest right now with the ice storm I'm having my own challenges here with these folks.

The good thing is, there is still some slush around so in this area, there's greater hope for a good ole fashioned snow day for us tomorrow!

Mike
Springfield, VA