View Single Post
psmith2.0
Mr. Vieira
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Tennessee
 
2022-01-18, 11:09

I can't even imagine something like that. 11-18" is the most snow I've ever seen/dealt with in real life.

The cool thing about the 1996 blizzard, with us in Northern Virginia, is that these big trucks were out all night, tons of them, all over the place (I could see the highway from our apartment) and I was amazed at how functional everything was the next day. The major highways and surface streets (and most neighborhoods?) were totally drivable. You had to be slow and careful, but nobody was "snowed in". Life went on. They actually came down into our complex and pushed a lot of it out of the way. Once you dug your own car out, you were pretty set to go.

We kept talking about how that amount of snow would bring Chattanooga to a standstill for at least 2-3 solid days, maybe longer. We just don't have those big salt/sand truck brigades here because it's only needed about once a decade, if that.

Up there, just below Washington, DC, they're ready for this stuff and they know how to act. It's almost like it never happened. Stores and restaurants were open, if schools closed it was only for about one day, I was back at work the following day (once I shoveled our cars out...there's a pic of me standing next to my old maroon Saturn, pointing to the snow up to the door handle). I'll never forget the awesome cast/"glow" all that white snow reflected into our bedroom that night. All the yellowish street lights in our apartment complex hit the snow, making outside, even at midnight, eerily "bright", and then that bounced up to our second-story corner bedroom (two sets of windows). You could almost read a magazine in the room with no lights on, it was so "bright"/illuminated and had this freaky "glow". I'll remember that look forever.

I remember stopping at Taco Bell that next day, going through the drive-thru with about 3-4 feet of snow piled up on either side of me...someone (management, a private company hired for the job) had come in there and cleared the parking lot/drive-thru lanes. For a Taco Bell!

They weren't messing around.

I was like "shit, I wouldn't get a taco back home for a week!"
  quote