They were predicting the worst for this winter storm moving through, and at the end of my meeting, at 2pm, I could tell things were getting crappy. They got me a laptop and I can VPN in, so I figured, screw this, I'm out.
A block away from work I couldn't stop the car, going down hill, toward a stopped car and a red light. I managed to slide around the car and run the light, turning left. Close call. It was not a good sign.
I-271 was ugly, but drivable for the most part. For some reason I decided to get off the at SR 303, which I knew was stupid given the hills. Sure enough, at the Summit/Medina County line, where there is an enormous 17% grade hill, the road was closed, presumably because something didn't make it up.
The alternate route is frankly just as bad, if not worse, and throwing a bunch of traffic on it didn't help. And of course, every ass hole soccer mom in an SUV thinks they don't need to give you safe distance. I nearly didn't make it up one hill, and red-lined my car a few times trying. Mind you this is at 3... it can only get worse.
What sucks about this all is that it's coming down so fast, and the wind blowing so hard, that no number of trucks are going to be able to keep up with this. I suspect I'll be working from home tomorrow.
I don't have school tomorrow (again), and I'm hoping they'll cancel work for Jamie too. This might be the worst storm I've seen in my lifetime, besides the ice storm 2 years ago (I think) that kept us in NW Ohio (when I lived there) without power for 2 or 3 days. That sucked a lot too.
Glad you made it home safely, and I hope everyone else did/does too.
They keep bringing up the blizzard of '78, but I remember getting let go from school for that and the drifts were enormous. Granted, I was a lot smaller then.
Kara is driving an hour west across Michigan tonight, then another hour west tomorrow... hope she gets there OK.
Here in Pittsburgh we don't it quite as nasty as you do over in Cleveland, but it's pretty bad out there. I left work at 4:30 today, MUCH earlier than usual. Fortunately for me, traffic was very light, because the people who would normally have been headed home at that time were long since gone.
I made it home pretty easily, and decided to shovel the snow off my sidewalk -- I know it's not done, but I figured it'd be easier to clear again tomorrow than do it all at once. The problem with that thinking? By 7 (when I'd NORMALLY be driving home from work), the snow had turned over to freezing rain. My nice clear sidewalk was a solid sheet of ICE. Damn. At least I wasn't trying to drive in it, though.
This isn't as bad as the Blizzard of 1978, which had a bit more snow, higher wind speeds, and a bigger impact on travel (not to mention a 6 hour temperature drop of 31 degrees in Cleveland!). But as far as I can recall, this is by far the worst storm Cleveland has seen since then. What made the '78 storm so impressive was how deep the low pressure was. The atmospheric pressure of that storm dropped to 28.28", which is a number only hurricanes reach. (Sorry, I guess I'm still a weather geek at heart :) )
Our office follows the Federal Building downtown. Since they closed, so did we.