Friday, December 19, 2008

Seattle ThunderSnow 2008: A Nightmare on Ice

Today downtown Seattle should have been declared a federal disaster zone. Unfortunately I had to go out and run some errands and got to witness the carnage firsthand.

Things started ominously in the middle of the night when I was woken up by the sonic boom of the ThunderSnow.  I thought a fuel tanker or something crashed and exploded outside my building. You can here it here http://www.king5.com/video/index.html?nvid=314479.

On Friday the roads were even worse than Thursday and some tour buses almost slid themselves off a wall onto I5 trying navigate all of the closed and blocked off streets.

They apparently thought it would be a good idea to try and drive their buses down the one hill that was not blocked off by the police. (No one was severely hurt.)

A lot of people made the clever mistake of trying to take a “shortcut” down some road that was free of traffic, only to end of crashed at the bottom. At one intersection I saw at least 5 different cars try and go down the same icy hill and end up slamming into the curb at the bottom of the hill. I warned this guy and not to go down the hill but he didn’t listen to me.

As you can see, the road is totally iced over.

I learned my lesson about driving in the Seattle snow about 2 years ago. I was at a party at the Red Hook Brewery in Redmond and then it started snowing. It took me about 6 hours to get home and along the way I crashed my car into a parked truck because there was just no traction.

The Seattle Times also has some good footage of the buses and other mishaps through out the area. Check it out before they go out of business.

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