The skies opened Thursday morning and we were visited by another four to six inches of snow and overnight temperatures well below freezing. The city owns twenty-seven trucks with snow plows and almost 1,600 miles of roadway to tend. It's not difficult to do the math.
Most streets turned into ice rinks and the neighborhood around Lincoln Park and the Fauntleroy ferry landing (where we live) was hard hit. Buses have not been running there because they cannot negotiate the hill that climbs to the 35th Street ridge, so my transportation options has been curtailed.
And, of course, the tires that served us so well in Florida gave out when faced with ice-slicked streets, so we were stuck numerous times, while out and about, until we offered up five hundred bucks for a set of traction tires to be mounted on the back of the X-Terra.
Newscasters estimated that almost seventy percent of all employees called off work Thursday. Friday morning, Metro Transit had "lost" seven buses. They were somewhere, of course, but abandoned by drivers who had not yet reported to work, and so dispatchers had no idea where the vehicles were.
And Friday afternoon, two tour buses, filled with teenagers, attempted to descend an ice-slicked street on Capitol Hill and wound up bumped together at the bottom of the slope with the front five feet of one bus hanging over over a retaining wall above the northbound lanes of Interstate Five. You can find a photo of it on the internet.
I asked Rachael if she wanted to move back to the Keys. She laughed. I guess she thought I was joking.
