As many Washington-area commuters are undoubtedly aware, rush hour is the worst possible time for a snowstorm. Drivers suffered through ungodly drives, sitting immobile for hours on slush-covered roads, navigating around cars left abandoned by their owners and crawling through intersections whose traffic lights were left black. Karen White, from Calvert County, left work in the District at 4 p.m. She never made it home. After six hours on the road, she ended up at a hotel at National Harbor just across the District line.
“It was just completely bumper-to-bumper,” she said. “Horns were flaring when we were on [Massachusetts] Avenue, but when you got out onto the highway, there was nothing anybody could do.”
Stranded drivers did whatever it took to cope. “Saw a couple people using their jugs in their cars,” White said with a laugh.
Road crews worked well into Thursday morning to clear vehicles from the George Washington Parkway, which, literally, turned into a parking lot overnight after a nearly 12-hour standstill.
By Thursday afternoon, the parkway was mostly clear with only a few cars still sitting along the road.
Rhonda Farmer, who lives in Waldorf, Md., left her D.C. office to catch a commuter bus at about 4:30 p.m. She didn’t get home until nearly 10 p.m.
“There were cars that had spun out of control, were stranded, a lot of [people] had gotten out of their cars,” she said.
The snowstorm also contributed to the deaths of at least four people in the region. In Anne Arundel County, a Pasadena man was killed by a pickup truck with a snowplow early Thursday. A Baltimore taxi driver, stuck in the snow late Wednesday, died when his cab caught fire. And a Westminster man died while shoveling snow.
In Washington, a man died after a tree fell on his pickup truck.
Alan Ishihara, from the District, said he was lucky to escape from a similar situation. As he was driving up Massachusetts Avenue near American University, a tree fell on his car and flattened it. Ishihara was hit in the head but not seriously injured.
He said he must have been leaning forward.
“It’s a miracle I’m alive,” he said.
