The Horrible Day In Pictures

I deliberately went light on the pictures in my post about yesterday's events.  What I was writing about was raw emotion that I did not feel could be properly conveyed with pictures distracting from my feelings.   

But I definitely did get plenty of crazy photographs yesterday, that really help illustrate just how bad the roads were.

The start of the journey

This is Camp Horne Road.  If you're not familiar with Camp Horne, know that is is a major thoroughfare.  It is 6 lanes wide - two lanes going in the direction that we were traveling and 4 lanes in the other direction (2 that go straight and 2 that turn.)  As you can see, it's down to one lane in either direction and the conditions of that one lane are less than ideal.

This is Fifth Avenue in Oakland.

 

Do you see any lanes? Because I certainly don't. 

  

The intersection at Fifth and Bouquet

Camp Horne Road on our first return trip - as you can see, traffic is starting to back up

They closed 279 outbound towards the airport to clear it properly - I totally support this

Inbound towards the Fort Pitt tunnels - good luck changing lanes if you need to

There were abandoned vehicles EVERYWHERE

Good luck to the owner of this vehicle when he or she tries to dig it out

Now, I know that this next picture is sort of blurry, but I need it to illustrate a point.  Do you see how that compacted snow/ice in the middle and on the sides of the lane?  If you hit that stuff, your tire basically slides or bounces off of it, causing you to temporarily lose control of the car.  And actually, this isn't even a great example of it, because at least in this particular spot there's asphalt underneath.  Where it's really treacherous is where is a tire track of ice with ridges of more ice on all sides of your tires.  It's scary and dangerous - trust me.  Multiple times we lost control of our vehicle because of this horrible ice.

So heed my warning - if you're home, just stay at home.  Just because the street in front of your house looks good does not mean that all of the other municipalities near you were as efficient. We had to learn that the hard way.