If anyone is thinking of going out this morning, DON'T!!
I just crawled back home at about three miles an hour after misssing the
biggest pile-up I've ever seen by a matter of less than fifty feet.The roads
at the moment are completely undrivable. I had to spin up an embankment and
hit a sign in order to stop and not mash into thirty or so other cars.
The storm that "surprised" MNDOT was forecast already at 4:30 a.m. by the National Weather Service. It was visible on radar and clearly headed to the Minneapolis area by 6 a.m.. Yet the plows were still scarce on the highways even after noon. Highway's under MNDOT's care thusly remained snow covered and slippery even until after noon.
Meanwhile by afternoon the sidewalks of the Minneapolis Public Housing building in my neighborhood were already cleared. Why was Minneapolis done clearing sidewalks while MNDOT was still struggling to clear freeways?
Minneapolis wisely has a cadre of hard working full time employees who are on the job and ready to clean snow or whatever off the streets and sidewalks almost as soon as it falls. Under Democratic administrations over a decade ago MNDOT did likewise. I used to drive Minnesota highways late at night hauling baked goods. In the night hours it was reassuring to see MNDOTworkers out there ready to plow back the drifting snow before it closed the road or drop some salt to melt the frost that developed before dawn. That was back when road maintenence was considered a full time job.
Today MNDOT has made highway maintence a part time job, waiting to call in plow drivers until the snow is already strangling our highways. By the time they get the plows mounted and the boxes full of sand and salt the snow is often a couple inches deep and icing up through compaction. This should have been an easy snow to deal with... with plows already mounted and boxes full highway workers would have switched from pothole patching to plowing and sanding as the storm hit. With the temperature just below freezing this would have been a day for heavy use of the washer fluid instead of the closing of an Interstate highway in the middle of a metropolitan area.
To make matters worse, the Republicans have put a billion dollar transit system out of service while they quibble over health insurance. So thousand of additional drivers, many of them seniors and such who don't want to drive or younger folks who're saving for new tires with tread on them were forced onto our overcrowded highways.
No wonder a couple inch snowfall closed an 8 lane freeway...
plowed out in Hawthorne,
Dyna Sluyter
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