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| Workers dig cars out from a tangle of tumbleweeds on New Year's Day in Washington State. |
There's always the risk of snow, sleet, freezing rain, high winds, flooding, intense cold or other problems to prevent you from getting from here to there.
Add tumbleweeds to this hazard list. No, us Vermonters need not worry about that during this or any winter. However, motorists up in Washington State had to deal with this, big time.
As NBC reports:
"A few people in Washington state spent part of their New Year's Eve trapped in their cars after winds blew a massive amount of tumbleweeds onto a highway.
The incident happened on Highway 240 in Benton County near Yakima, a city about 150 miles southeast of Tacoma. Washington State Patro Trooper Chris Thorson told NBC News that 911 calls started to come in around 6:30 p.m about people trapped in their vehicles.
He said winds that night were between 40 to 50 mph and it took about 30 minutes for the tumbleweeds to fully encase five cars and partially trap a semi-truck. The highway in both directions was closed for more than 10 hours in order for the tumbleweeds to be removed."
Thorson told the Seattle Times that occupants of the cars trapped in tumbleweeds "were not as amused as the rest of the people watching. Some of them had to ring in their New Year fully encased in tumbleweeds."
People think of Washington State as wet, and not prone to arid location hazards like tumbleweeds. But eastern Washington where the tumbleweed attack took place is dry because the Cascade Mountains to the west of this location block so much of that moisture coming in from the Pacific Ocean.
Yakima, Washinton, near where this took place, only averages about nine inches of rain per year, compared to the roughly 37 inches wet Seattle, Washington on the Pacific coast gets.
Here's a clip of people trying to rescue vehicles and clear the tumbleweeds:
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