=VG= SemlerPDX

Yesterday we got 2 inches of snow in less than 6 hours centered around rush hour traffic. This only happens every several years, and no one seemed prepared. Whole damn city pretty well shut down and this morning it's crawling back onto it's feet with snow shoes on. The giant hill that is the main road off our street is a mess of pileups frozen in action, abandoned for the night. I saw a car with it's dome light on - at least one of them will have a dead battery when they return.

Not one can move as all the cars are touching and bearing the weight of each other. It will be an engineering challenge to safely dislodge them individually without sending one rolling off the side and into one of the houses along the hill.

I took a walk up the hill to look at the mess, there were about 10 cars a quarter of the way up this 1/2 mile hill, a steep hill with angles from 4 to 7 degrees. A set of four cars were sandwiched together right in the middle of the road.

Another pair were frozen in what was a head on collision and they're nearly rolling off the side of the road, and one of them is wedged a foot in the air where their front ends meet, it's tires suspended above the icy ground.

Everyone else that couldn't make it up the hill parked their cars along my street everywhere there was space. They'll have to wait for the snow to melt to get emergency equipment up the hill in order to resolve that massive pileup.

Firstly, people here do not know how to drive in the snow, and secondly the trucks think they can go full speed and ignore packed snow even when they are not 4x4 off-road style trucks. The ignorance and false hope is frozen in a picture of those cars parked in their crashed positions on the hill.