I live in North Carolina where we get snow, but never that much so a couple inches will keep us out of school since we don't have the army of snow plows that states farther north have. Unfortunately we had a bit of a problem last year in the county I live in(wake county). What happened was about 3-4 inches of solid ice came now completly covering all of the roads. When the storm first started the school system let all the schools out an hour earlier. What did this do you might ask?
-All the cell phone towers were completely jammed due to the mass amounts of people trying to call each other.
-Because of this you had to keep trying to contact your parents or some nearby family member for a good 1-2 hours before you even got an answering machine.
-Also due to the lack of cell tower use(and all other phone lines for that matter) 911(the US emergency number) was blocked. People were skidding into each other and no one could contact any fire trucks/police officers/ambulances.
-My friend and I ended up staying at school until we decided to walk the 8 miles home.
-Every major and minor road was blocked up. It took people 8 hours to get home when it normally took them 15 minutes.
-We became the laughing stock of the nation as cities like Chicago(a city to the north) had headlines saying "ONE INCH!!!"
-My friend and I didn't get home till 10, even though we only had to walk 8 miles because of the ice.
-People began to abandon their cars on the sides of the road, forcing them to walk as much as 30 miles, and increasing the traffic.
-One good thing was that people learned to work together! On one road that is very crowded normally it was horrible. People found a way to move along at about 2 mph and keep everyone safe. The road had 3 lanes and was slightly concave so that everyone decided to keep everyone in the left and right lanes, so that if one person skidded into the middle they wouldn't hit anyone else. This allowed the people nearby that car to stop the traffic and get the person back on the road if possible.
-Police officers were every where and their only concern was getting everyone back home safely. This meant that they didn't care if you rode by mooning them. They simply didn't care, allowing people to ride without their seatbelts on which caused a few deaths.
-Krispy Kreme had to stay open 6 hours past normal so they could house a couple homeless people and a few whose cars just couldn't keep moving.
-Wal-Marts, Targets, and other large retailers became temporary homes for many.
-My brother almost had to stay the night at school, but thanks to the niceness of my neighbor he got home at around 1 in the morning, so I made him a hotdog and he went to bed
-My mom got home at 4 in the morning and my dad managed to be out of town at the time on a business trip.
-For a solid 2 months the only thing people talked about was this storm causing many to go mad at hearing someones near miss with a pickup truck that skidded right in front of them and off a bridge over and over again.
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Anyway, so even those huge snowstorms and such never have something like this happen. It was due to a combination that everyone was still active, the school system letting the kids out with almost no warning, and the inability of snow crews to get through traffic and put salt and sand down to get rid of the ice.
