Highway 169 - an outpost of Chaos

[dreamshark]

This morning, anyway. Even at 9:30am the highways were stop and go. The roadway was essentially snow-free, so I was puzzled by this... until the first time I hit the brakes on a bridge.  Aieeeee!  Fortunately the stopped cars ahead of me were far enough beyond the icy bridge that I didn't actually skid into them. After that I didn't have any more trouble (because I didn't brake again!). But there was a semi overturned at the south end of the New Bloomingon Ferry Bridge and more flashing lights than I've seen at one accident in a long time. The semi trailer was propped up on the side railing of the bridge at a rakish angle and the cab was nowhere in sight. I'm not sure if it had been towed already or if it went over the edge. Once we crawled past that, traffic started moving a little faster. Which may have been a mistake. I saw 4 or 5 vehicles in the ditch, and at least a half-dozen more sets of tracks in the snow where vehicles had obviously gone off the road in the very recent past. Yikes.

I'm now screwing up my courage to leave work at the height of rush hour - necessary in order to get to my skating class in Bloomington. I hope they've put some sand on the highway or something - salt isn't going to do much at this temperature (-6 Fahrenheit). With a little luck the ice may have been worn away or melted by the friction of the car tires. On the other hand, there may just be a new layer of black ice from the sub-zero car exhaust. Fun fun fun.

Comments

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I took P to work this morning and picked him up tonight by driving on surface streets. It was pretty stress-free.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I had less-severe excitement of this sort on 394 this morning. I first noticed clear evidence of the slippery state of things when my drive wheels broke loose when I tried to accelerate gradually from about 25MPH. That was a nice, safe time to find out. I saw a few accidents, but nobody actually in the ditch. And lots of people driving faster than *I* thought was safe, and apparently getting away with it.

If I'd taken the time to check the online traffic info, I might have tried surface routes to. (Then again getting on my computer and starting to look at things in the morning is not conducive to getting to work in a timely fashion.)