I’ve written about the Children’s Blizzard today, but decided to put it into Reprint because of the focus on history.
I’m very glad that the blizzard we had over the weekend did not kill 250-500 people.
Historical Snowstorms and Blizzards
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Tag Archives: blizzard
Seriously, Don’t Drive! Really, We Mean It!
Some people believe the press catastrophizes storms in an attempt to scare people into reading the news. Mostly we just pass on what the National Weather Service says, which is often, in fact, scary.
In this case, visibility has dropped to zero in some places, there’s people in the ditch all over the place, and MN/DoT and the National Weather Service are both telling people to get the heck off the roads (and I paraphrase).
Please do not drive out there, people. For reference, we are under a blizzard warning. Most of the previous storms (including, in our part of the state, the Christmas Blizzard) have not qualified, technically, as blizzards.
(That’s not to say they weren’t, in common parlance, blizzards–winter storms that drop a lot of snow and have some wind and ice associated.)
This one is an actual technical blizzard, and it is very dangerous out there right now.
If you travel, you put yourself at risk, but you also put at risk all the emergency personnel who will have to rescue you. They can’t see any better than you can out there. Unless there is some emergency, by which I mean someone is bleeding or dying, please do not drive!
Driving Conditions Treacherous, Even in Town
The visibility in the country and fringes of town is absolutely horrible, and despite our small army of plows and sand/salt tossing folks, the roads are slippier than a greased monkey.
(Go ahead, you try holding onto a greased monkey some time.)
I ended up actually running a stoplight today when the light turned yellow, I braked, and my car decided to just keep going. Fortunately I was going very slow, and the cars on the other sides of the intersection had plenty of time to see that the car was not in the stopping vein today. My vehicle slowly slid through the intersection, I gripped the steering wheel like it was my hope of heaven and it was pretty much fine, thanks to the other drivers.
By driving very slow, I also managed to avoid smashing into a van that had taken a turn a little too fast ahead of me and ended up pointing the wrong way on a one-way lane. I waved at the driver and smiled reassuringly. He smiled back, and turned off the street.
Frankly, today is a good day to not drive, because all that fluffy light snow that fell yesterday is blowing all over kingdom come, and the roads are slick to boot.
Driving Conditions Still Pretty Yucky
The plowing is continuing today, but because there are so many more people on the road, there have been a lot more accidents than there were over the weekend and Christmas Day.
It is not pleasant to drive out there. Even in places where most of the snow is gone, it’s still pretty slippery, because the remaining snow is packed into a nasty layer of ice. And it’s also very, very cold out there in comparison to the weekend.
I’ve been listening to collisions occurring all day today, with emergency workers going to and fro helping people. Please, please drive carefully if you are driving today, and heed the warning of the good Sgt. Bolt and be patient!
Snowmageddon Continues
Do not go anywhere today, even if you’re in Worthington!
I got stuck twice on the way to work. Once on the way from my cross street to Diagonal, and once in the Globe’s parking lot, which hadn’t been plowed out yet.
Unfortunately, me being a dim bulb, I didn’t realize that until I’d already turned into it. Oops. Fortunately a kindly snowplow man bailed me out, plowing all around me, which made my shoveling job to get me the rest of the way out a 5-minute endeavor. Without snowplow guy it would have been at least half an hour.
The plow folks are out in force and they’re doing the best they can, but when you have 15 inches of snow in two days it gets really hard to keep up.
Don’t drive anywhere today, that’s my advice! If I hadn’t had to work I wouldn’t have myself.
Merry Christmas!
We Wish You a Merry Blizzmas
Christmas plans don’t always work out.
Thousands of people across the country have discovered that fact today, if they didn’t already know it, and I am sure it’s hitting some people very hard.
Take heart. Christmas comes just once a year, but nobody said it had to be on December 25. Many people work on Christmas every year, from snowplow drivers to restaurant owners, and not everybody has a choice.
Christmas was always a big deal in my family, but when I was a child we very rarely celebrated it on Christmas. No, it wasn’t on Christmas Eve, either.
Generally speaking it was December 26 or maybe even after that when my family jammed the contents of our entire home (or so it seemed) into the car and headed to grandma’s house, which was over the highway and through the fields, then through some other fields, and then through some more fields. Southern Minnesota has lots of fields.
My dad is a minister, so as long as I can remember he’s been doing something or other for work on Christmas, whether it’s a midnight service Christmas Eve or some other festive, cheerful church service on the honored day itself. I never felt bereft, though, when our family had to stay behind on Christmas Day, or when dad kindly chose to stay by himself so the rest of us could go to grandma’s.
We kids got our loot on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, which was fun, but then we made the trip to our grandparents’ house, which was where Christmas really began: with 13 or so adults trying to manage 15 children of various sizes and ages. Mostly we were herded to the basement, where we proceeded to break or maim many of the toys we had just received. We had fun doing it, because we were together.
Later I learned the adults actually preferred children to sit upstairs while they told family stories, provided you behaved yourself reasonably well. They’d pass around dozens of Christmas cards, photos and letters, and you could learn a lot about the family that way, especially if they forgot you were there.
And of course there were cookies of every possible shape and size: krumkake, rosettes and lefse, the traditional Norwegian goodies, and the special German butter nut horns from my dad’s side of the family that my mother slaves over, along with dozens of sugar cookies liberally dusted with colored sprinkles, thumbprints, peanut butter stars and my very favorite, the understated currant cookies, which may in fact be made of Christmas, cut somehow down into cookie form.
It was Christmas.
Sometimes it wasn’t December 25, but it was Christmas all the same.
Blizzmas 2009
The snow has already begun to fall in Worthington as of 2:17 p.m., but there are still about 30 minutes to get wherever you plan to be for the foreseeable future and stay there.
Please take this weather warning seriously! I know the National Weather Service sometimes seems willing to scare us all half to death over a few flurries, but this time they kept using a specific term over and over again in their press releases: life-threatening. This storm is life-threatening. It is a once-in-25-years storm. It is severe and above all, it is life-threatening.
It is better to be alone for Christmas than being dead for Christmas, and if you drive in this weather you are risking your life, as well as the lives of whatever emergency personnel are going to have to drive out in the snow to rescue you from the ditch, because they can’t see either. I have been in a snowplow and the driver’s visibility in one of those things is actually less than that of someone driving a regular car.
Please, please stay home!
I set up a separate section on our website specifically to make it easier for people to monitor the weather conditions and the storm. It’s right here. Keep an eye on it; I’ll be keeping an eye on all the sources I can today, tomorrow and the next day, since after all… I can’t go home now either.
Snowpocalypse Now
Hold onto your hats, folks, because a big fat blizzard of epic proportions is apparently heading our way, right in time for the Christmas season.
Some upset to people’s holiday plans is expected, and I think my family may end up having Christmas at some point, but probably not this week.
The scanner is going a bit wild with reports of people who have fallen and cannot get up, people who are stuck in vehicles, and worse, some very severe-sounding car collisions (we’ll have something on this as soon as we can). Please, please be careful out there!
Personally, I just got back from a 10-day vacation, so I’m a bit bewildered and overwhelmed by everything that’s going on, particularly the untimely death of one of my very, very favorite sources, Andrea Ruesch, who touched countless lives in her work with 4-H in Jackson County.
I didn’t know her very well, but she was a funny, gracious, articulate and intelligent woman who made a very real difference in many people’s lives, and she will be sorely missed.
Post-Blizzard Worthington Traffic Report
When I went to the YMCA at noon, driving downtown was treacherous, and several times I found my little car slipping and refusing to stop whenever I went around a corner, even if I slowed to a near stop every time. Attempting to actually stop, well, that was even worse.
When I returned to the Globe office downtown at around 1, however, the downtown drive was much easier. There was less snow in intersections, leading to easier stops, or maybe that side of the road was simply better and no plowing was actually done over that hour. I don’t know.
I’m inclined to give credit to the wonderful people who drive our snowplows and sand/salt our roads, however.
Stick to the main drags, though, if you have to go anywhere in Worthington. Stay off the side roads and drive slow!
Also, don’t tailgate! A giant red pickup truck tailgated me halfway back to the Globe, and I kept thinking: "You’re not having any trouble because you’re a truck, but my little car won’t stop on a dime, you jerk!" I was so relieved when he turned in a different direction.
Blizzard warning over, wind chill advisory still on…
