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| Holy Moly! Welcome to New Jersey |
Did you miss the first parts of my series?
In previous stories: My blizzard saga begins with a fender bender on the way to work at the Asbury Park Press. The snowstorm starts and I find myself unable to get home. That night I make a trip through the blizzard to Walgreens to get some supplies. I spend a night at the Marriott with some editors from the newspaper who have also been stranded.
In this part:
I wake up to more snow that I've ever seen before in my life. I walk to the newsroom on Route 66, pass a stuck ambulance, a stuck police car, then I make it to the newsroom, where I spend the morning immersed in blizzard-havoc as New Jersey wakes up to more snow than it's had since records started being kept.
I woke up with a start and turned on the TV to see what time it was.
It's 5:28 a.m.
I woke up with a start and turned on the TV to see what time it was.
It's 5:28 a.m.
I gave myself a high five for being able to wake up without an alarm clock, because I didn't have one and my phone was dead.
I slid open the curtains and the world was white. The sight drew a gasp.
Monmouth county was ground zero of the blizzard.
It was so beautiful.
I gathered up my belongings, and dressed in my clothes from the day before. I gave my boots a whiff and they were smelly. I was loath to put them back on, as they were still damp.
I knew that the hotel wouldn't be serving breakfast until 6:30 a.m. so I took the elevator down to the lobby and decided to break into the kitchen.
The lobby was empty and dimly lit.
I looked around then noticed a tea self-service area.
Bingo. Next to it was a door.
At that moment, I was reminded of this video game I play on Xbox called Fallout and the thought made me laugh because playing Fallout has honed my exploratory drive and item collecting skills to the point where I really feel like I totally could survive in the post-apocalyptic wasteland if I had to.
I eased the door open, flipped on the lights and there it was, a smallish room with a fridge, a counter-top, a sink and a pantry.
I took a coffee cup, scooped in a dollop of brown sugar and a pat of butter and dumped in some uncooked instant oatmeal. Then I wrapped up a bagel in a napkin and grabbed some peanut butter and jelly packets and figured that this would be my lunch.
I walked outside and wished that I could fast travel to the newsroom, but I had nothing but me and my Uggs to get me there.
There was so much snow! Deep heavy snow covered everything. It had stopped snowing, but the wind was still kicking up dusty white twisters and the air was dense and quiet.
Trudging through this was completely out of the question, so I decided to walk in the narrow trench that a plow had carved out along the highway.
Progress was slow.
I walked down Jumping Brook to the Route 66 intersection that I'd been stuck in the night before. Planted firmly in the middle, lights flashing was an ambulance flanked by 2 EMTs who were hacking at the snow under the tires with shovels.
A uniformed officer was helping them. I noticed that he wasn't wearing any gloves.
I'd have to pass them to get to the newsroom so I figured I'd offer help, not that I had anything like strong back muscles or something else good to lend them.
"Hey," I called out, "How long have ya'll been stuck?"
They notice me, "About fifteen minutes," one said.
Movement in the back of the ambulance caught my eye and I saw people in there.
"What happened to them?" I asked.
"They spent the night in their car," an EMT said. "They got stuck, we picked them up."
"But now we're stuck," the other one chimed in.
"Can I help somehow?" I ask him.
He sizes me up.
The officer notices me being nosy. "Can I give you a ride somewhere?" he asks me.
Stay tuned for Part V:
Stir-crazy and craving adventure, Steven decides that he wants to brave the blizzard to come visit me at the hotel 45 miles away. I take a trip through the raging storm to Walmart with a funny stranger, they let us shop even though its closed and I get supplies. After that, I might get too bored to finish this project so hopefully I'll wrap it up in part 5 but who knows man.
It was so beautiful.
I gathered up my belongings, and dressed in my clothes from the day before. I gave my boots a whiff and they were smelly. I was loath to put them back on, as they were still damp.
I knew that the hotel wouldn't be serving breakfast until 6:30 a.m. so I took the elevator down to the lobby and decided to break into the kitchen.
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| Also my lock-picking skills are sick nasty.. thanks to Fallout. |
The lobby was empty and dimly lit.
I looked around then noticed a tea self-service area.
Bingo. Next to it was a door.
At that moment, I was reminded of this video game I play on Xbox called Fallout and the thought made me laugh because playing Fallout has honed my exploratory drive and item collecting skills to the point where I really feel like I totally could survive in the post-apocalyptic wasteland if I had to.
I eased the door open, flipped on the lights and there it was, a smallish room with a fridge, a counter-top, a sink and a pantry.
I took a coffee cup, scooped in a dollop of brown sugar and a pat of butter and dumped in some uncooked instant oatmeal. Then I wrapped up a bagel in a napkin and grabbed some peanut butter and jelly packets and figured that this would be my lunch.
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| Me and my Uggs made it to work! |
There was so much snow! Deep heavy snow covered everything. It had stopped snowing, but the wind was still kicking up dusty white twisters and the air was dense and quiet.
Trudging through this was completely out of the question, so I decided to walk in the narrow trench that a plow had carved out along the highway.
Progress was slow.
I walked down Jumping Brook to the Route 66 intersection that I'd been stuck in the night before. Planted firmly in the middle, lights flashing was an ambulance flanked by 2 EMTs who were hacking at the snow under the tires with shovels.
A uniformed officer was helping them. I noticed that he wasn't wearing any gloves.
I'd have to pass them to get to the newsroom so I figured I'd offer help, not that I had anything like strong back muscles or something else good to lend them.
"Hey," I called out, "How long have ya'll been stuck?"
They notice me, "About fifteen minutes," one said.
Movement in the back of the ambulance caught my eye and I saw people in there.
"What happened to them?" I asked.
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| I was bundled up! |
"But now we're stuck," the other one chimed in.
"Can I help somehow?" I ask him.
He sizes me up.
The officer notices me being nosy. "Can I give you a ride somewhere?" he asks me.
I looked over to his patrol car. It was sunk down into a snow drift.
"Nah. I'm just walking over to the newsroom," I told him, pointing to the nearby Asbury Park Press building.
I waved goodbye to the EMTs and continued to walk down the plowed part of Route 66.
I passed a pickup truck buried in the snow, abandoned.
A car came behind me in the road and I had to jump into a snow drift to let it go by. The driver was careful not to hit me and I had trouble getting out of the drift and back onto the road. It was too high.
I passed a pickup truck buried in the snow, abandoned.
A car came behind me in the road and I had to jump into a snow drift to let it go by. The driver was careful not to hit me and I had trouble getting out of the drift and back onto the road. It was too high.
The wind was strong and icy, biting at the exposed skin on my face, neck, wrists.
I felt the cold beginning to seep down into my layers of clothing.
I approached the building and assessed my next route. The parking lot at work was largely unplowed and so I had to trudge laboriously through the waist-high snow in the parts where a sidewalk used to be.
It was hard work for a lazy out-of-shape whiner like me and I was breathing hard and struggling as I worked my way through the snow.
The parking lot was a graveyard of abandoned cars that had gotten hopelessly stuck in various spots. The plow driver had tried to weave out a path among them, but you can tell he must have had a hard time of it because they were all over.
I walked up to the entrance that I usually go in through, and it was a wall of snow.
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| There's a car under there... |
The large glass door usually opened outward but I couldn't wrestle it open.
I tried to kick away some snow to give it room to open but I was just making a messy pile of snow and my feet were getting cold.
I banged on the door. Then I saw movement inside the building as a maintenance guy noticed me and came over.
"Go to the front door," he said, "We can't get you in this way."
Ugh. I didn't want to walk anymore so I stomped my way over to the front door on the opposite side of the building and got in.
Three maintenance guys were there, looking worn, tired and damp.
"Did you guys stay here all night?" I asked them even though it was obvious that they had.
"Yeah, we were plowing and shoveling but then we couldn't get home."
A TV was on nearby tuned to a news station and they were watching it, cradling cups of coffee in their hands.
"Anyone else sleep here?"
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| This is what I wrote, but I wanted to write: I have conquered thee blizzard! Bow before me in submission! |
"No, just us. The hotel was booked."
"The newspaper delivery trucks kept getting stuck, so we had to go help dig them out all night," one said.
I went upstairs to the newsroom and sat down at my desk feeling like a hero.
I took off my wet boots and my wet articles of clothing and turned on my computer and opened all of my work pages.
I was instantly bombarded and fully immersed in a frenzy of blizzard news and I put myself into fast mode where I have 15 tabs open on my computer and 5 million tasks at once.
Traffic alerts were buzzing on it, I kept rewriting them franticly and posting them as soon as they came over, recaching the home page of APP every 30 seconds like a maniac.
I didn't even have time to clean up the home page, I just started posting reports to APP as they came over the news wires.
There were tons of reports.
The airports were all a mess, and travelers heading home from the holidays found themselves marooned, as flights were canceled at airports all over the country.
Trains were stuck, frozen, or rerouted.
Power outages were rampant, power lines were pulled down by the snow, or poles were hit by vehicles and it was an outage, power restored, then another outage somewhere else.
Schedules were all discombobulated as NJTransit restricted, then fully suspended service for all buses, trains.
The roadways were a complete disaster. There were tons of stories about people who got stranded in their cars, eventually being rescued. Hundreds of abandoned cars littered the roadways, hindering plowing efforts.
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| The a.m. reporter took this picture on the way to work. 6:30 a.m. Dec. 27 on Parkway north. |
The smaller plow trucks were all stuck in the snow.
The heavy-duty plows capable of moving 3 feet of dense snow were in short supply and in hot demand.
Businesses were all closed.
A tow truck had hit a snow-covered SUV that had been left there when the driver got stuck. It was empty when the plow truck hit it, but the impact caused an engine fire. The fire burned itself out when the fire truck couldn't get to it.
The newsroom phones were ringing off the hook. One older sounding caller complained that her newspaper wasn't delivered.
I hung up on her.
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| Reporter took this picture too, of an abandoned car left on the Parkway before 7 a.m. Dec. 27. |
My cell phone was buzzing with texts from editors, bosses, reporters, who were feeding me information and checking in with me and offering to help. They were all stuck at home.
I had my hands full trying to run the web site, I was alone in the building and I was completely frantic.
The morning reporter called, he was stuck in Parkway traffic.
"Is there anything going on up there? An accident or something?"
"I can't tell," he answered me. "I just wanted to let you know that I'm on my way."
"Alright," I said, " If you see anything interesting, take a pic with your cell phone cam and send it to me asap. If something happens, get comment call me back and I'll type it up as you read it to me. Drive safe. "
"Ok," he said. "Wait, it looks like they're rerouting drivers."
"Are you northbound?"
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| How many inches are in 3 feet? This photo was taken in Brick Twp. |
"Yes," he said. "Oh, I'm so close to the exit, too. Damn. I can give you a traffic update... it looks like they're rerouting Parkway drivers up ahead, the road's all blocked off."
I added that to the traffic story with a time stamp then hung up and twittered it out to APP followers on Twitter.
I needed writers.
I needed somebody writing storm stuff up for me so that I could have it for the web but everyone was having trouble making it in because of the storm.
My phone rang and it was a state police officer spokesman or something. He asked me to put something up on APP telling people to stay off the roads. "We need everyone to stay off the roads," he said.
He was right, I had to get that up asap.
I realized that the average person has no idea what a state of emergency means to them. I did some googling and found an FAQs piece on the state's web site that explained it out. I didn't have time to write up a brief about it so I just copied the link and set it up on APP.
A staff photographer called me to tell me that he'd put 2 new photos into our system of a neighborhood working to dig itself out. I grabbed one and used it to remake the homepage.
New emails kept popping into my work account.
Most of the emails were complaints: People complaining that their streets weren't plowed, that they were trapped in their homes without milk, eggs, bread, that their elderly father, mother, sister, brother needed to get medications from the pharmacies that were all closed.
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| "I can't go outside to play, so I emailed you to complain about it." |
Rescue workers couldn't get to the homes where they were summoned and then they couldn't get to the hospital. In one case, an injured man was pushed out to the rescuers on a sled.
Seemed like everyone had a personal blizzard-related crisis and soon my email account was full.
I checked the web site traffic reports to see how many page views APP was getting and found out that traffic was booming. I was completely thrilled.
I know from experience that photo galleries are sure fire numbers boosters so I put up an article soliciting blizzard pics and the submissions came rolling in as fast as the page views.
As I was struggling to organize this crazy amount of information coming in about this blizzard, it became apparent to me just how bad it actually was.
This might be the worse snow storm New Jersey has ever been hit with.
I realize that I am smack dab in the middle of ground zero of this blizzard and that the storm hit hardest in my newspaper's coverage area.
The state was completely crippled.
I didn't have time to waste thinking about it, and turned my attention back to work.
I heard a noise behind me and it was one of the maintence guys.
"You're up here all by yourself?" he asked me.
"For now," I told him.
"Come downstairs and have some coffee," he said.
I needed the break, my eyes were aching, my hands were cramped up from typing and my mind was fried from thinking too much and all in a hurry.
I went downstairs and I'm chatting with the maintenance guys when we see through the windows a woman battling the winds outside.
"Who's that?"
"I can't tell," I said.
The wind was swirling up snow around her and we watched her walk up and into the building. She saw us and came over.
It was a staff photographer.
"I just drove here from Pennsylvania," she said and we all stared at her in amazement. "People from New Jersey can't drive for shit." She shook the snow off her.
I told her that she was my hero.
Stay tuned for Part V:
Stir-crazy and craving adventure, Steven decides that he wants to brave the blizzard to come visit me at the hotel 45 miles away. I take a trip through the raging storm to Walmart with a funny stranger, they let us shop even though its closed and I get supplies. After that, I might get too bored to finish this project so hopefully I'll wrap it up in part 5 but who knows man.