Elliot Ritzema

Category: Weather

  • Oh, the Weather Outside is Frightful…

    I’m not turning this exclusively into a weather blog, but with the craziness that has been going on lately, I just had to write this – my second post on the weather in three days.

    Here’s how this Wednesday went down:

    The forecast on Tuesday night called for snow overnight and into Wednesday morning, but it didn’t happen here. There was a light dusting as of 6 a.m., but really nothing to write home about. So as has been the case for Monday and Tuesday, the school district decided to delay school by just one hour. Between one and three inches was forecast for the rest of the day, but considering the beginning, this seemed manageable.

    When I was driving out to pick up high school and middle school students, it began to snow. Hard. Three hours later, by the time I had dropped the elementary kids off at school, it had snowed several inches and showed no signs of stopping. For effect, strong winds started blowing too. For most of the morning route I went very slowly. The bus slid a little bit when I was making a few stops, and I developed an eye twitch.

    I returned to the bus yard at about 10:50, and by 11:45 the powers that be had decided to get the kids back home as quickly as possible before weather conditions got worse. The high school let out at 1:20, and the elementary schools let out at 2:30. The mechanics spent the intervening time getting tire chains on as many buses as possible. (some buses have automatic chains, and those that don’t have sand-deploying mechanisms) I spent the time fortifying myself at the local Subway.

    When the buses lined up at the high school, we knew we were in for a rough afternoon. It was still snowing, the wind was still blowing, and on the two-way radio I could hear that a couple of bus drivers who were bringing middle-school students to the high school had already gotten stuck. Unbelievably, though, I made it all the way out to my stops without incident. True, on a normal day it takes me 20 minutes to get to my first stop whereas today it took closer to 30, but I just wanted us all to get there in one piece. On my third stop, I was going up a small hill and got stuck. The bus wouldn’t move forward.

    After trying to get unstuck for several minutes, and drifting backwards and to the right until the right rear wheels were wedged against the curb, I called in on the two-way radio and said I was stuck. I was told that a mechanic was coming out to help. Most of the students got off the bus right then and there, since most of them live within a 3-block radius of that stop. After digging out the snow behind the back wheels and burning off a little more rubber, I finally got unstuck and finished dropping off the remaining two students who were still on the bus. By the time I had finished, the transportation department had already gotten another driver to take over my elementary route.

    That was a good thing, because I would have been about 40 minutes late getting to the school. I also got stuck again when I was going back to the bus yard. It was the same situation: I approached a stop sign on an incline and couldn’t get going again. I had learned a little bit from my first experience, but not enough. I wasn’t planning on stopping, but the person in front of me did. So we were both stuck. Eventually I managed to turn around by hopping a curb to my left and cutting through a parking lot.

    Even though my bus driving day was over at 4, the adventure wasn’t over because I still had to drive home. And even though the snow was no longer snowing, the wind was still winding. I made it out of Ferndale just fine, but it was when I got out on the blustery county roads that I had problems. First I tried heading east on Axton Road, but the wind kept blowing huge billows of snow over the road so that I couldn’t see anything. Once when my view was obscured by one of these billows, the rear of my car started creeping around to the right. I skidded to the right, then to the left, then to the right again, and when I stopped I was turned 130 degrees to the right. Since I was most of the way turned around, I headed back in the direction of Ferndale and took a different road east. This road still had the big puffs of snow over the road from time to time, but when this happened I tried to just look for any points of reference that I could find – signs, telephone poles – to make sure that I was still on course.

    Finally I was on the home stretch, just a mile or so away from home. However, the home stretch is apparently prone to snowdrifts. And today, it was also prone to those puffs of snow over the road. Once, when another puff turned everything white, I hit a thick patch of snow, skidded again, and ended up in a shallow ditch on the left side of the road, perpendicular to the road and facing a white fence (that I had fortunately not run into). Since the rear of my car was still on the road, I was panicked about getting hit by any oncoming cars. But fortunately, I was able to rock back and forth enough to get the momentum I needed to get back on the road. Now I’m at home, thankful to God for preserving me through this day (and a little sheepish about all the swearing I’ve done under my breath).

    And there’s no school tomorrow.

  • Where am I? Nebraska?

    Beginning last Saturday and continuing until next weekend (at least) the Bellingham, WA area is experiencing its longest cold “snap” (“snap” is in quotes because this is way longer than a snap, but I don’t know what the word for an unusually long snap is. Maybe a zip, because a zipper is, like a snap, a device for fastening, except it is much longer. I am going to call this a cold zip from now on, and I am going to close this parenthesis now) since 1990, according to the local paper, the Bellingham Herald. The high today, Monday, was 26 and the low was 10. Right now, at 7:00 p.m., it is 21 degrees Fahrenheit, but it feels like -4 because of the windchill. The winds are NNE at 28 mph. Gusts today have been up to 60 mph.

    It has only snowed about three inches in some areas, and a light dusting in others. Because of the lack of snow, the school district I drive a bus for did not cancel school. There was a 1-hour delay because they didn’t want bus drivers to be driving (or students to be waiting) in the dark on potentially icy roads. My biggest adventure with the road conditions this morning was at a place called Finkbonner Hill, which all the local kids like to sled down when it snows. I never drive down it; only up. It is the steepest part of my route, and I am not supposed to go up it when I am driving the version of my route that I drive when it snows. But because of the small amount of snow, I was not driving the snow route. Against my better judgment, I decided to drive up it, despite the fact that it was nearly covered in about an inch of icy snow. There were six kids on board at the time, so I figured I was light enough to zip right up.

    I was wrong. I was about halfway up when my forward momentum completely stopped, and panic set in. I downshifted. I eased the accelerator up and down to see if I could get some traction. I looked desperately on the dashboard for the button which deploys, Batmobile-like, sand in front of the rear tires to improve traction in just such a situation (later I found it in the upper left-hand corner, obscured by a badly placed cleaning rag). There were concerned looks on the students’ faces as the smell of rubber filled the bus. Eventually (aided by the hand of God, I’m sure), the bus got traction and we went up the hill. I ignored the stop sign at the top of the hill for fear of repeating the slide, and continued on my route. This afternoon, I avoided Finkbonner Hill completely, even though avoiding it causes me to make an unusually sharp right turn and drop off one student 100 feet away from her house. She’ll live. But I’m not sure she would if I had to go up that hill again.

    I also had about a dozen extra students this morning because their regular bus was not able to make it out of the yard, but that is a different story. This story is about how unusually cold it is, and how unusually long this cold zip is going to be. It wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the wind (which likes to bat the empty bus back and forth on the road like a cat playing with a mouse; but that, again, is a different story).

    In the end, though, I can’t complain. I have a warm place to stay, and I am also thankful for the shelters that have opened their doors to the homeless in this area. And when this is over, western Washington will go back to its usual mild-climate self. Even though it is colder now than it is in Nebraska (I checked: The windchill here, as I mentioned, is -4. In Lincoln, it’s -3), Nebraska is only going to get colder in January. Washington will get warmer. At least, that’s what I keep telling myself.