Two-year anniversary of Snowpocalypse 2010

[creadinger]

2013 – 2010 = 3

This is the 3rd anniversary of the Snopocalypse storms. We recently had the 2 year anniversary of the Commutageddon snowstorm of 2011.

[scorchedearth]

I’ve been wishing for another snowstorm since.

[Steve]

I personally prefer naming the storm “SnowMyGod.”

[creadinger]

I was proud of “Apocalypse Snow”. Kind of a play on the movie Apocalypse Now. Didn’t stick though.

[fuzzy]

Wasn’t it call snow-Appaloosa?

[Dirt]

Snowmageddon was my personal favorite.

It is a day that I will remember well. Very good and very bad things happened that day for me. On my way to work I had a runner do a double “Crazy Ivan” in front of me. I missed her the first time she jumped in front of me, but when she jumped back to the right after realizing that she’d just jumped in front of a cyclist, thus effectively jumping in front of me twice in about 10 feet, I was faced with a choice of crashing on purpose or hitting her. I chose to crash.

The end result was a severely separated shoulder with some pretty bad ligament damage. It took a long time to come back from that. The good side of that is that I didn’t have to shovel any snow at all from that storm or the one that followed.

The bad side of it is that I didn’t get to ride my bike through any of that…. and my shoulder still looks funny.

[Greenbelt]

I was riding my old CX bike back and forth to Metro back then. I packed a snow shovel in my backpack so that I could shovel out my bike locker. The whole episode sort of made it sink in that I really could ride in any weather, at least to Metro and around town, and therefore didn’t need that extra car.

If memory serves, which isn’t always the case any more, I started commuting all the way downtown shortly after Snomageddon, in part out of just pissiness that Metro didn’t tend to the bike areas very well (plus they were poised to raise the locker fee by a lot).

[KLizotte]

@Dirt 43166 wrote:

Snowmageddon was my personal favorite.

It is a day that I will remember well. Very good and very bad things happened that day for me. On my way to work I had a runner do a double “Crazy Ivan” in front of me. I missed her the first time she jumped in front of me, but when she jumped back to the right after realizing that she’d just jumped in front of a cyclist, thus effectively jumping in front of me twice in about 10 feet, I was faced with a choice of crashing on purpose or hitting her. I chose to crash.

The end result was a severely separated shoulder with some pretty bad ligament damage. It took a long time to come back from that. The good side of that is that I didn’t have to shovel any snow at all from that storm or the one that followed.

The bad side of it is that I didn’t get to ride my bike through any of that…. and my shoulder still looks funny.

Ouch, I hope the jogger at least stayed behind to help you. That sucks.

[Dirt]

@KLizotte 43174 wrote:

Ouch, I hope the jogger at least stayed behind to help you. That sucks.

She was very nice, very apologetic and did help me pick up the pieces. Riding the last 3 miles to the office, taking a shower and then getting driven to the emergency room by my boss was all rather painful.

On the good side, my boss LOVED the excuse to leave the office early (before 7am) and even drove me all the way to the emergency room closest to home. That gave him what he needed to continue to his home and finish his day from there.

I will add this: I always seem to get hit by the nicest people. In a way that’s comforting. In another way it is really sad. I don’t feel like I can get really angry at people because they’re so dang nice! I know. I’m special.

[PotomacCyclist]

It snowed so much in 2010 that my math skills were permanently impaired…

(I think the following story took place on Feb. 9, but I’m not sure.)

I remember that I tried to stick it out at work until the usual closing time. I had taken Metro to work and planned to take it back in the evening to Arlington. The heavy snow didn’t start until late at night, but Metro closed down all of the above-ground lines and bridges by early afternoon. When I walked outside, I tried to hail a taxi, but there wasn’t a single taxi to be seen anywhere in downtown Washington. No cars at all. Capital Bikeshare was not yet in place (and it probably would have been shut down because of the storm). So my only options were to sleep in the office or walk back home.

On a normal day, I could have run back home in 45 minutes or so. But I didn’t have running shoes. It wasn’t snowing yet, but there was over a foot of snow on some of the sidewalks, from the previous storm. (This is why I think I’m describing Feb. 9, not Feb. 5, 2010.) I tried walking past the Jefferson Memorial. It was very slow-going. My foot would sink a foot deep into the snow with each step. Climbing up the short hill to the 14th St. Bridge (George Mason Bridge) was a nightmare. Then when I finally got up to the bridge, I had to be very careful about walking. Because of the snow, I was standing very high up against the railing. It would have been easy to slip and fall over the side, and down into the freezing Potomac River.

When I reached the other side, I decided that I couldn’t walk down the path to the Mt. Vernon Trail. None of that was plowed and it was dark. I don’t think I would have ever managed to make it down the trail. So I cut across the road. There was almost no car traffic, so that wasn’t a problem. It took me about 2 hours to walk from downtown D.C. to Arlington.

If CaBi had been around and if it had stayed in operation until the heavy snow started falling, then I probably could have taken a CaBi bike. Because of the impassable trails, I would have had to ride in the traffic lanes on the 14th St. Bridge. Normally that would be suicidal. But not on that Feb. 2010 day. Well, maybe it would still have been dangerous. There were a few drivers out on the road and some of the car lanes were also blocked off by snow.

In any case, I made it back. But my internal clock lost a year, and that’s why I think it’s the two-year anniversary of the first of the Feb. 2010 storms.

[fuzzy]

I lived in Southern Maryland then. When it hit, people abandoned their cars on DC 295. I was driving my unnecessarily huge F250 powerstroke 4X4, I had no problems & it looked like an apocalypse happened, or nuclear end of the world type shizzle. I was expecting to see skeletons slumped over the wheel as I weaved around the cars.

[Author]

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