Snow Storm Tale

I sat down this morning to pen a short note to my wife and daughter about the snow storm yesterday and my exploits with Meaghan Thomas for ABC 3340. I did not intend for it to become a novel, but it came close. After emailing it, I thought this might prove an interesting read for some. So, with a few edits here and there, here is the story of this rather epic Alabama snow storm from the point of view of one meteorologist whose assignment was to provide field coverage for the television.

Well, it was quite some day yesterday. Most of Central Alabama was placed under a winter weather warning for Wednesday, February 25th, from 9 am to midnight. The various computer models were all clustered around the same solution of between 1 and 8 inches of snow generally along and north of the Interstate 20 corridor. Meaghan and I met at the station at 9 am to head out in the Storm Chaser. The only words of guidance we received from James was “Find some snow!”

With our quest at hand, we drove to the northern part of Birmingham and then headed a little northwest toward Jasper. We had been given a list of all the various news teams and their locations, and we were supposed to float while each of the news teams was pretty much fixed in their assigned spots. We drove up US 78 toward Jasper using the old US 78, not the new US 78/I-22 route. We had a team in Jasper, so we did not want to go there, so we headed more north toward US 278. Turns out that was a great decision because it put us in the middle of the heaviest snowfall.

As we got onto US 76/I-22, we spotted a State Trooper stopped on the side of the road, so we pulled alongside and chatted with him to see if he had any reports of travel issues. Precipitation was still mostly liquid with a little sleet in the mix and the temperature hovering around 33 or 34 degrees. After speaking with the officer who said there he had not heard of any travel problems, we drove north to the northern side of Jasper on old US 78 to pick up Alabama 195 north which would take us to US 278 which runs mainly west to east from Hamilton to Double Springs to Cullman. We knew the computer guidance and the map James was using were zeroing in on this area, so we figured it would provide the best staging point to go further north or south or east or west depending on what developed.

The station has a midday show from 11 am to noon, so we were providing live streaming from our iPad mounted on the dashboard of the Chaser. We kept having a cold rain with a temperature of 33 or 34 with some sleet mixed in. We actually drove out of the rain to dry ground as we reached US 278 which was a bit disappointing. We drove west for a few miles and then took a route south to Brilliant and Winfield trying to move back into the precipitation. We got to the intersection of I-22 and Alabama 129 and, after filling up the gas tank on the Chaser, we stopped in the parking lot of a new Huddle House not yet open where we would not bother anyone by being stopped. We had not been there two minutes before a car pulled up next to us and it was the Police Chief from Winfield. He wanted to know what was going to happen and we discussed the weather and exchanged business cards – maybe that will work as a get out of jail free card someday!!

The police chief left, and another car pulled up to us and said it was snowing north in Guin. Guin is actually west of Winfield a few miles, so we were a little confused by the report the man gave us. We decided to shift west on I-22 a little and pick up Alabama 253 and 44 that would take us southwest to Guin figuring the man meant Guin and not actually north of us. That decision was based on the radar which was showing precipitation to our west and we figured the fellow just had his direction wrong. Well, this was another great decision because as we headed southwest into Guin from I-22 and reached the city, the precipitation was changing over from a moderate sleet to just snow, those nice big flakes that were actually clumps of flakes.

We stopped on the side of the road in Guin on US 43 to get our bearings, look at radar, and communicate with the television station when a Guin police officer pulled up behind us with his blue lights on. Meaghan looked at me and asked what we’d done, and I told her nothing, we were just sitting there on the side of the road. The officer came up to my window, I was driving, and I lowered the window, and he said he was just stopping to be sure we were okay and safe so he had stopped his car behind the Chaser to make sure no one hit us! We had a nice chat with him about the weather and about the conditions in Guin, got a tip on a place to eat (naturally), and headed back on US 43 toward Winfield. Guin and Winfield are in the southeastern section of Marion County.

When we reached Winfield, we grabbed lunch at an open McDonalds restaurant because we wanted to get something to eat before everything closed. We did a couple of hits on the midday show and the ground was becoming white with snow. We noticed a snow plow, so we followed the snow plow and sand/salt truck east on US 43 getting the station to use our live video stream to show the trucks doing their jobs.

We turned north on Alabama 129 and once again stopped at the Huddle House where we’d been earlier, and refreshed our bearings with radar and the latest weather statements and computer guidance. By this time the snow was coming down like gangbusters and the roads were turning white. The station began wall to wall coverage about this time, so we decided to head back north on 129 to US 278 which still seemed to be the bullseye for the heaviest snow. This, too, was a great decision.

Conditions began to deteriorate rapidly once the precipitation had changed over from sleet to snow, and the road was completely covered by snow. Fortunately, the area where we were was not heavily populated, and it seemed that many, many people heeded the warnings about the winter weather, so there was virtually no traffic to contend with. We reached US 278 and turned east with no particular destination in mind but just to stay on US 278 where the snow was falling heavily. Most of the time we could see two sets of tracks, one eastbound and one westbound, but on several occasions there was only one track to follow and we could tell it was on the wrong side of the road. No danger, though, since we were about the only vehicle moving. We had put the Chaser in four wheel drive shortly after the snow began, so we had good traction, but just like other cars, we were not going to stop on a dime. That’s why we were traveling at a safe 20 miles per hour. Visibility was also very bad at times with less than a quarter of a mile in the heavy snow.

It was slow but steady progress along US 78 through Winston County with occasional stops to get some photos or take a measurement of the snow. When we reached Addison, we saw a Cullman Electric Cooperative bucket truck, so we pulled into the parking lot of the Dollar General and asked the driver if there were any outages. The snow was pretty wet and some of the trees, especially the pines, were beginning to sag under the weight of the snow. He told us they were being dispatched to a power outage, so we could follow him.

We did and ended up in southern Winston County near the edge of Smith Lake where several trees limbs were sagging with the snow and had taken out the power line to several houses. We did another hit or two with the station which was now in full swing with weather coverage, and then found our way back to Alabama 257 to head south across Smith Lake on the Duncan Bridge. We did another hit with James with the Duncan Bridge in the snow as our video shot. We turned east again on Drummond Road and Burrows Crossing Road to reach Alabama 69 which would take us northeast toward Cullman. The plan was to take Alabama 222 back northwest, but when we made the turn from 69 onto 222, we were faced with a steep hill and it was quite obvious that there had been no cars on that road for quite sometime. We stopped and reconsidered this move and decided this was not a good idea. So we continued northeast on Alabama 69 finally reaching Interstate 65.

Before continuing, we took another snow measurement and found a spot where the snow was about 6 inches deep, the length of a dollar bill. We also made a note to include a ruler in the Chaser for future snow chases! We also noted that we need an ice scraper for the Chaser. We had to stop numerous times to de-ice the windshield wipers as they would become frozen and really streak the windshield.

We once again topped up the Chasers gas tank at the Petro station, made a pit stop, and then drove to the bridge over I-65 where we could get a shot of the Interstate. While we were there, a single file line of cars and trucks lead by a State Trooper came along the northbound lane and we got some great video of how bad the Interstate was. We stuck around this spot for a little while as James and Charles took our shot from time to time. There were cars moving slowly on the Interstate, but it looked like the one lane that was partially open was icy. We decided to go north on the Interstate just one exit to sample the driving conditions on I-65. It was as we had suspected, icy on the one lane track that everyone was using. We were moving about 30 mph with most of the rest of the traffic with an occasional bonehead passing us in the snow covered lane at 45 mph. We got off at the next exit and headed back on the southbound side of I-65.

We got off at the same exit where we had gotten on, the Dodge City exit, 299, and grabbed something akin to supper since it was now about 7 pm. The Petro station at that exit was the only thing open, and they were serving food, so we took it. A 7 pm, the television station was returning to regular programming, so our orders were to head home!

The driving conditions on I-65 were horrible, but almost everyone was behaving themselves, so we had little trouble as we motored south. The snowfall became lighter and the amount of the snow on the road was getting less and less. It was snowing in downtown Birmingham, but we could tell that it had not been snowing there long. The roads appeared to be mostly wet, but we discovered that was not the whole story when an ambulance moving along ahead of us without emergency lights going suddenly fishtailed nearly smashing into the cement guard rail. Fortunately, the driver was able to bring the ambulance to a halt without hitting anything. Traffic was extremely light, so there were very few other cars on the highway. The Chaser is equipped with some highly visible strobe lights, so we came to a safe stop and turned on the strobes so that cars behind us would not run into us or the ambulance which had come to a stop across parts of three lanes. The ambulance driver kicked on their emergency lights, too, and then after getting their composure back, turned the ambulance in the proper direction of traffic moving at a slow pace.

This was quite some adventure, and we streamed video along nearly all of our trip with only a few dropped connections. But the adventure was not quite over. As we pulled into the station parking lot, Meaghan and I collected our belongings and were walking toward the station entrance when out of nowhere we were attacked by a volley of snowballs thrown by several ABC 3340 staff people. We did the only thing we could, weresponded by grabbing up some snow and returning fire!

It was really something to be a part of what will go in the record books as a historic snow event for Alabama.

-Brian-

Category: Alabama's Weather, Winter Weather