Mediocre Snowstorm Shuts Down A Major U.S City, Again

Just lovely. Highways 40 and 64 in the St. Louis
metro area on Friday. 

A winter storm is moving west to east across the central U.S. having started in the Rockies, moving through the mid-Mississippi Valley, with an eye on eventually getting to places like Virginia.

For areas in the Midwest being affected, it's a pretty big snowstorm. It won't be the worst ever, but it's substantial, dumping six to 12 inches in a wide swath from Kansas to the Mid-Atlantic.

By the way, us New Englanders are going to completely miss this snowstorm. It's passing by well to our south.

This pretty good but not enormous storm has had an outsized effect in St. Louis, Missouri. As the snow flew, cars also flew off icy highways. The result was absolute gridlock Friday evening and overnight. People were stuck local freeways for many hours as people got stuck on icy roads, or people couldn't get past traffic accidents.

Video is at the bottom of this post.

People in the St. Louis area reported that it took five or six hours to get home from work on trips that normally take 15 minutes or so. As of early this morning, there are reports of numerous people in cars and trucks stuck on Interstate 44 in Eureka, Missouri, west of St. Louis, with no end in sight.

I get it that St. Louis is not exactly in the Arctic, and they aren't nearly as used to snowstorms as, say,Minneapolis or Buffalo.

Timing had a lot to do with this mess, as it does often when cities get gridlocked in snowstorms. The worst of the storm came into St. Louis during the day, when everybody was at work. When they tried to get home, chaos ensued, as they say.

The snowy traffic nightmare continued well into the night around
St. Louis. This is Interstate 44 on a traffic cam image

This is the second time this winter that a major metropolitan area got gridlocked by a daytime snowstorm. In November, the same thing happened in the New York City metro area.

People then were trapped in cars almost overnight. That snowstorm dropped a whopping six inches of snow. You'd think that wouldn't be a big deal, but whatever.

Before I get too smug as a winter-hardy Vermonter, I've seen this situation happen around here, too.

It  usually takes me a half hour to get home to St Albans from work in Burlington. I can remember being trapped on local roads and Interstate 89 for up to three hours during snowstorms.

It seems like everywhere, people just don't know how to drive in the snow. Or don't want to drive properly in the snow.

I guess that's human nature, so we will always hear of these tales of people stuck unnecssariily in big storms.

Here's motorists trying, and largely failing, to move along Interstate 44 in downtown St. Louis last evening: