Snow-blogging

[drwex]

Seems to be the thing to do so why not join. My experience was "be smart enough and lucky enough to get the hell out of the way before the mess settles in."

To be specific, I got a call saying that K's school was closing early - noon-thirty - and I'd need to be home to receive him. Pygment's job has some kerfluffle about her being "essential personnel" (despite being a contractor, yeah right) so she wasn't leaving. Fortunately, half my office is down in NY for the company holiday do anyway, so I irc'ed to my boss that I was leaving early and he said no problem.

(This AM I hear on the radio that over 1000 Boston schoolkids were stranded in schools as late as 9PM until enough buses could manage to get them all out. Kudos to the drivers who kept going that late and to the principals and teachers who stayed with the kids to make sure they were cared for, warm, and fed. But geezus guys it's not like Boston doesn't get snow; how do you screw up something as basic as getting kids home in a storm? Listening to Menino huff and puff trying to avoid responsibility for how badly the city had arsed this up was almost comical.)

So I went home and had a minor panic when K didn't show up on schedule. (Details not of interest to anyone but me - I'll do things slightly differently next time.) Eventually I got him and went to collect L; filled the tank on the way home, just in case. Called Pygment about half a dozen times, urging her to leave work NOW and not at the proposed 3:30.

Got home and shoveled the first 3 or so inches of powder off the driveway in hopes Pygment could also park there. It took her a couple hours to get home so she had to shovel again anyway. Then we just sat at home and ignored it. This AM we had to shovel another mass of snow plus the usual plow-in.

All in all not nearly as bad as it could have been. The proposed weekend nor'easter could be worse if it really does dump the forecasted couple inches of icy crap on top of this mess.

Comments

[feste-sylvain.livejournal.com]

I posted mine for my own sake, when perusing the month of December 2007 some day in the future.

Sounds like you had a day as well.

[drwex]

I consider myself equal parts clever, lucky, and appropriately paranoid.

[catness.livejournal.com]

I suspect it was less about availability of buses and more about ability to get from place to place. Easy to blame a politician, but from observing people try to get to and from work, between 13:30 and 22:15, travel time ranged from ~2-7 hours, and at least Kendall Square was entirely in gridlock for 5 of those hours. All directions, as far as the eye could see, nothing but sitting. Most of our second shift people didn't make it in, and had to abandon their cars because they were out of gas after 5+ hours of idling. Last guy gave up at 20:30, after having left to come in from the South Shore at 13:00. He made it to Dorchester at around 18:30 before he started walking.

My housemate left work at 19:45 and got home around 22:00. Since she called me with updates, I got lucky and missed the hell. I made it to my car by 22:20, and got home by 22:48 - 5 mile drive. It's about 15 minutes at that time of night, usually.

[(Anonymous)]

My belief is that prepositioned equipment and faster road clears would have prevented the gridlock. But perhaps I'm too optimistic about that.

[catness.livejournal.com]

The roads were fine to drive on around Kendall Square. All backed up traffic that I saw was because *drivers* blocked intersections repeatedly (and in fantastically stupid ways), in order to get themselves half a car length closer to their destination.

In my opinion, the only possible way to prevent that is to put the fear of god into Massachusetts drivers, by legislating heavy fines against blocking the box.

[(Anonymous)]

Hmm, didn't New York City do something similar. Did it work there?

By the way, I'll agree that the drivers are idiots. I did not see downtown but out on the fringes where I was driving most of what I saw was people behaving badly because there was (ooh scary) frozen water somewhere near their cars.

[catness.livejournal.com]

Yes, NYC did that. Yes, it worked.