Followup: Mid-Atlantic Snowstorm Travel Nightmare Fallout, Ice Causes More Fallout, EVs and Communications Failures

Near the start of the Great Traffic jam that stranded 
thousands of motorists on I-95 in Virginia Monday
to as late as Wednesday.

UPDATE 1 PM THURSDAY:

 Monday and Tuesday, it was Virginia that experienced a snow debacle on highways, especially I-95.  Wednesday, it was New York, Connecticut and New Hampshire dealing with icy road gridlock.

Today, it's Nashville, Tennessee that has fallen into gridlock as snow fell this morning at a rate of up to 2 inches per hour.

The Nashville snow is part of the storm system that could cause major traffic problems tomorrow morning along the I-95 corridor between New Jersey and Massachusetts.

PREVIOUS DISCUSSION

Interstate 95 in Virginia, where some people were stranded for up to or even more than 24 hours after Monday's snowstorm shut it down, is reopened, but things are just barely getting back to normal today, three days later.  

And more snow is due in that region tonight and tomorrow.

So far, I haven't seen any reports of deaths or serious injuries related to the disaster. If that state of affairs holds, it's great news. 

Radio station WTOP said traffic was indeed flowing if slowly on Interstate 95 by Wednesday afternoon, but major service roads nearby, like Route 1 were still hopelessly gummed up.  

The slowly easing mess in Virginia came as new travel troubles engulfed swaths of the Northeast on Wednesday.

Light freezing rain, enough to ice up the roads, led to the chaos of numerous crashes, slide offs and traffic jams Thursday. 

Roads throughout the New York City area were at a standstill or at best crawling along Wednesday morning. Several main thoroughfares closed for a few hours, which really snarled the traffic.  A 20-vehicle crash on the Hutchinson River Parkway killed one person, says the Washington Post.

Traffic was backed up for miles around Manchester, New Hampshire due to the icy roads. Video from Hooksett, New Hampshire showed stopped cars and trucks with semis sliding sideways and crashing into stalled cars.   Miles long backups also hit around Bridgeport and Waterbury, Connecticut.

It wasn't only in cars where people experienced nightmares this week. Aside from the highway delays, an Amtrak train in the same area got stuck by snow and especially numerous trees falling onto the tracks. 

According to the Associated Press: 

"Amtrak's Crescent, which left New Orleans on Sunday on its way to New York, got stuck north of Lynchburg, Virginia on Monday morning, returned to Lynchburg and remained there until finally eading northbound again late Tuesday afternoon."

Passengers complained of overflowing toilets, no food from midday Monday until McDonald's food was brought in midmorning Tuesday, and a lack of communication. 

It was the Northeast's turn on Wednesday to have traffic
 chaos and crashes on the highways due to light freezing rain.
This was the scene near Manchester, New Hampshire
Wednesday morning. 

Of all the many things that went wrong in this snowstorm, a lack of communication from state and local officials seems to be the worst problem. 

It had to be a frightening situation, made more unnerving due to a lack of information.  Humans generally do better with firm information, even if the news is really bad, than they are when they don't know what's going on

"Some callers (from their cars) were sobbing and scared. Psychologically, it is extremely distressing to be motionless on a highway for hours on end without knowing how much longer it will last," said WTOP traffic reported Dave Dildine. 

This is Monday morning quarterbacking, I realize, but I've seen over and over again how a lack of communication with the public and within agencies inevitably makes disasters worse. Even if you tell people you do not yet have all the information yet and are working on it, that's so much better than saying nothing at all. 

These epic traffic backups do happen from time to time in large winter storms. (Witness the New York City area during a November, 2018 winter storm).  They'll happen again. Possibly as soon as tomorrow with a snowstorm due from New Jersey to Boston during the morning commute. 

On another related topic, here's something I hadn't thought of until I read it in the Washington Post: We're not there yet with EV vehicles and winter storms. 

As this  Washington Post Op-Ed notes:

"It is a scientific fact that batteries of all kinds lose capacity more rapidly in cold weather, and that includes the sophisticated lithium-ion ones used by Teslas and other EVs. Carmakers can, and do, mitigate cold weather 'range anxiety' through various technologies; Tesla is touting a new 'heat pump' to extend winter range. Drivers can save battery power by say turning off the heat."

A lot of good turning off the heat will do you when stranded in a winter storm. 

It's also harder and more time consuming to re-charge an EV battery in cold weather. There's also still not all that many charging stations available for EVs when they're on a highway in a winter storm. 

Since EVs seem to be the future, we need to make sure the technology is advanced enough to keep people safe when things go wrong on the highways.  Life isn't always a sunny day with clear roads ahead. 

 

Still Questions About Friday Nor'easter, Cold Weather and I-95 Nightmare

Thousands of cars and trucks stranded for up to 20 hours,
and counting this morning after snow and ice along
Interstate 95 in Virginia.

 Winter has definitely arrived in Vermont after a very late start. Seems flipping to a new year did the trick.   

Burlington got to zero before midnight, so that January 3 turned out to be the first zero or below of the season. 

 Some of the cold hollows in the Northeast Kingdom got into the minus teens.  This is nothing odd for a Vermont January, but it is a real switch from what we've been seeing.

Now that we got those subzero readings out of the way, we can look forward to variable, windy weather, a possible nor'easter and an even worse cold wave next week. 

I'll get more into that in a minute, but can we first talk about what is going on along Interstate 95 in Virginia. 

I-95 DISASTER, VIRGINIA

That flash snowstorm and freeze in the Mid-Atlantic states yesterday turned into a real life-threatening situation along a stretch of Interstate 95 near Fredericksburg, Virginia yesterday and overnight. 

Heavy rain, followed by a few hours of blinding snow during the workday is a recipe for a real mess anywhere. Ice builds up immediately on roads, and heavy snow then makes things even more impossible. I've seen that situation in Vermont.  People end up getting stuck for hours as traffic gets stuck behind wrecks. It happened all over the Washington DC area yesterday. 

At least in DC, things largely got untangled after several hours. 

But I-95 in Virginia got way beyond that. Trucks wrecked and cars got stuck during the height of the storm in the late morning.  Cars got trapped.  The wild thing is they were still trapped there overnight and into this morning along a 48-mile stretch of the Interstate. In both directions. 

As you can imagine, hundreds of people ran out of gas, food and water overnight as temperatures fell into the teens.  Many people did not have warm blankets or coats to keep them warm. Medical needs are going unaddressed.

As I write this at 8:45 a.m., the situation was ongoing.  The state and emergency authorities finally got their act together this morning and were heading out with food, water, gas and tow trucks. There are kids, pets and elderly people in some of these cars.  I need more details, as you can imagine, but I'm wondering why they didn't start dealing with this Monday afternoon.  

The snow abruptly stopped falling in Virginia shortly after noon Monday. Skies cleared. You'd think somebody would have started to untangle the mess during the afternoon.  Yes, people would have still waited for hours, but at least some of them would have been on their way by dark. Or so you'd think.

News reports say they're trying to get people off exits so they could get gas and lodging. But exits are blocked by wrecks and ice. Gas at stations near the Interstate have run out of fuel.  Hotels are obviously booked. 

Unless I find contradictory information about this, somebody dropped the ball in Virginia. I'll update with news of any casualties, and what made this mess go on for so long overnight and this morning.

VERMONT FORECAST

I don't see anything in the forecast that would suggest Vermont will have nearly as bad a time as Virginia, but the weather is going to keep us on our toes.

If you like up and down temperatures, this week is for you.

We get a quick, windy warmup by tomorrow as a storm passes by to our west.  We won't get much precipitation with this, just some light snow and flurries here and there. Valley temperatures will briefly rise above freezing, but it won't feel all that warm with gusty south winds on Wednesday.

Then theres's Friday.  Forecasters are still watching for a nor'easter to develop, but we don't know its path yet.  It could go off the coast, giving Vermont little or even no snow.  It could hug the coast, giving Vermont a nice big snowstorm, especially south and east.

For what it's worth, the American forecasting model, which had been taking the storm out to sea well east of New England, has been nudging it closer to the coast in recent updates. 

But that trend could reverse and the truth is we probably won't have a good sense of how this will affect us until Thursday morning. Even then, the forecast for this thing will go through  updates and revisions even as the storm arrives. Or doesn't arrive. 

After that, we get into gusty or even perhaps strong south winds Sunday with another brief warmup, followed by what could be a cold wave that would be quite a bit more frigid than the one we just had overnight. 

On the bright side, even if we do get a nasty Arctic outbreak next week, it won't last all that long. On the other hand, there's little or no sign of any warm or even warmish weather through the third week of January.