A fearful, frigid night on iconic Chicago road

[Guest guest]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110202/ap_on_re_us/us_winter_weather_stranded_on_la\

ke_shore

A fearful, frigid night on iconic Chicago road

By DON BABWIN and LINDSEY TANNER, Associated Press Don Babwin And Lindsey

Tanner, Associated Press – 2 hrs 32 mins ago

CHICAGO – Lindsey was on Lake Shore Drive, but she couldn't tell where.

It was dark, and the snow swirling around the stranded bus made it impossible to

see anything but the closest cars.

There was talk among her fellow commuters of 25-foot waves washing up from Lake

Michigan and about when the bus might get going, but nobody knew anything — not

the driver, not the emergency operators passengers were calling, and not the

shivering motorists climbing aboard to keep warm after firefighters pulled them

from their cars.

When a group of passengers decided enough was enough and started to walk, she

joined them.

" I got 100 feet, everything was an orange hue, there was snow in my face, I

couldn't see anything, I turned around and couldn't see the bus and I thought I

was going to die, " she said Wednesday morning.

, 26, was among hundreds of people in at least 1,500 vehicles who found

themselves trapped on Chicago's most famous stretch of road for as long as 12

hours Tuesday night and Wednesday morning during one of the worst snow storms in

the city's history. The situation was among the worst impacts from the winter

storm that carved a frigid path along a 2,000-mile stretch across the eastern

U.S.

In the morning light, the roadway looked like rush hour had been stopped in

time. Three lanes of cars cluttered the road with snow reaching as high as the

windshields. Some cars were almost completely buried. Bulldozers worked to clear

the snow from around the cars, then tow trucks plucked them out of snow drifts

one by one.

On a stranded public transit bus, a two-way radio echoed eerily through the open

passenger doors. Some abandoned cars still had yellow hazard lights blinking

through the snow — without a human in sight to see them.

The stranded vehicles were the worst breakdown in Chicago's handling of the

storm.

Some motorists came away angry, frustrated and puzzled at why the city didn't

close the crucial thoroughfare earlier, or why officials didn't anticipate that

a bus accident could clog it up like a cork in a bottle.

" In 31 years with the city, I haven't experienced anything like we did at Lake

Shore Drive, " said Orozco, Mayor M. Daley's chief of staff.

Later, Orozco told reporters that it was his own call not to shut the road as

soon as snow began, and stood by the decision. Late Wednesday, it wasn't known

when the road would reopen, and some 200 cars were still stuck.

City officials estimated as many as 900 cars were caught in the jam; an AP

photographer at the scene counted at least 1,500.

Orozco said more than 130 firefighters, some on snowmobiles, and 100 police

officers were sent to the road. As they sat and waited, the stranded motorists

gratefully gobbled down granola bars and drank coffee and Gatorade, brought to

them by Good Samaritans who climbed fences and railings to deliver them.

For hour after hour, the passengers in 's bus waited. As lightning

crackled, and wind gusts of up to 70 mph whipped up the snow and buried vehicles

before their eyes, they huddled in their cars and on buses.

With word spreading that one or more buses had jackknifed ahead of them and

sealed the drive, they tried to make a break for it. Fearing that they would be

swallowed by the snowdrifts that by morning had climbed to the tops of vehicles,

some turned around.

" I thought if I fall over, what would happen if I got buried under a pile of

snow? " said , who made it back to her bus as much by feel as sight.

With so little information out there, motorists said the mood slipped from

jovial to apprehensive and even to panic.

" The bus driver kept yelling,' We are all gonna die,' " said Ron , a

51-year-old salesman who was on a bus bound for a northern neighborhood where he

lives. It wasn't clear if the driver was joking and " nobody thought it was

funny, " said at a hospital, where he was taken.

In cars, after watching their gas gauges falling, drivers tried desperately to

keep their vehicles idling long enough with heaters on full blast to warm them

up before turning off the ignition to keep from running out of gas.

People called family and friends on cell phones, as much to get information and

ask to be rescued as relay what was going on — mostly because nobody knew.

Carolyn Pirotte, a 28-year-old nurse, just waited in her car and talked to her

husband on the cell phone. He caught a ride as far as he could get, then started

walking. He peered into windows until he spotted her just before midnight, six

hours after her ordeal began.

He climbed in and waited with her for three hours until firefighters took them

to a warming center at a nearby hospital.

As for , she wonders why she hopped on that bus just before it rolled onto

Lake Shore Drive.

" I should have been smart enough not to take that route, " she said.

___

Associated Press writers Tarm and Caryn Rousseau contributed to this

report.

[Guest guest]

I read some reports that from midafternoon on people were already getting caught by the storm. The reports said that the storm came in so quickly that even if people had planned to leave work early they ended up right in the middle of it all. People did tend to die in blizzards like this in the past and not just in the rural areas but also in the big cities.

Some years ago my mother was a teacher. I was out of town when a big snow and ice storm hit the town. She had gone in on a Saturday to do some work in the room and such when the storm hit. It had gone on for a while before she realized what was going on. The news was saying that hundreds of accidents had already happened and several miles of the interstate was closed due to the wrecks. Fortunately for her she taught at a Catholic school which had some nuns living there in an attached building. They invited her to stay the night in one of the guest rooms so she wouldn't have to risk being on the roads, which made sense especially because there were some steep hills between there and home.

This led to a funny incident. My mother couldn't get in touch with me directly since this was before I had a cell phone. Instead she called my partner's office and left a message with his secretary. She told the secretary that she was snowed in at school as was staying at the convent. The secretary repeated the message while writing something like "I.. am.. staying.. at.. the.. ... convent?" They had a laugh over that as she explained it and the secretary also thought it was funny as she explained it to me.

As it was, my mother had a nice evening there with the nuns and stayed in one of the guest rooms which had its own bathroom. This was another fairly harsh winter because it got very cold in south Alabama as well. I remember frost, which is uncommon, and it was cold enough that I had to buy winter gloves and add layers for when I went outside. I'm still using those gloves.

In a message dated 2/2/2011 9:18:12 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, no_reply writes:

A fearful, frigid night on iconic Chicago road