on twitter tuesday, i wished for snow.
what a misguided wish that was. the forecast called for a "dusting". well, lemme tell you, we got a little more than a dusting.
i left work around 11:30 - like most everyone else in the entire city, because that's when it really started coming down - and found myself in 2.5 hours worth of traffic just to go the 0.9 miles to my house. it was a nightmare. but not nearly nightmarish enough compared to the trials of my friends and coworkers, who spent the night in their offices and sat in their cars on I-65 until they were rescued by four wheelers at 4am.
i ended up parking my car downtown and walking home. my car is still downtown because the roads to my house are iced and blocked with abandoned vehicles. i am hoping that once everything melts i can get my car back!
this has little to do with our inability to drive in snow & ice - it's more so about our lack of prepardeness and infastructure to handle this sort of event. we have no trucks to salt the roads. we have no snow plows. so here we are with in complete and total disarray from just a few inches.
in the past few days, i've seen more stories of kindness than i have in a long time. like the doctor who walked six miles in the snow to perform brain surgery, the teachers sheltering the kids stuck in schools overnight, or the countless good samaritans helping people out and feeding them in the cold. so while the city shuts down in snow, you can't kill the southern hospitality. birmingham is a great place to be!
