Texas Ice Skate Party

I usually make sure that I am not trucking in the wintertime…but this year was different. I had a good job running from Los Angeles to Charlotte North Carolina for Fed Ex Ground. We used a southerly route, through Tucson, El Paso, Dallas and Atlanta and with a bit of luck there would be no storm dramas to deal with.

However, in one of the worst winters in recent history, our luck ran out when we hit a massive February Ice Storm. For some reason the Jet Stream warps south into Texas, which allows frigid arctic air to invade the area. Add some precipitation and you have a nasty ice storm.

The storm set a record of 100 hours of continuous sub freezing temperatures. The single digit lows were the coldest temperatures in 15 years. During this time it was actually colder in Texas than in Alaska.

Some in the north might not think much of a Texas winter storm, but for a number of reasons they can be dangerous. Not the least of which is the inexperience the locals have with such weather. They don’t seem to understand the need to slow down. The number of vehicle crashes was stunning. The City of Ft Worth had 480 crashes in 4 days.

“We love driving in the snow," said Dieter Sturm, 55, of Wisconsin, in town for the Super Bowl. "We can handle that without a problem. The icy roads are another story."

I was running with Andrew on this trip. We had double trailers which do not do well in icy conditions. Andrew hit the edge of the storm while I was sleeping. I woke up at dawn to start my shift. It was deep winter…snow everywhere. At this point the trucking wasn’t so bad…the road was clear. But around Abilene I started to hit ice. To understand why the ice formed here, all you had to do was look at the hills beyond Abilene. They were filled with hundreds of these new wind turbines.

Obviously this was an especially windy area. Wind blew the snow across the road where it would be compacted by passing vehicles. Soon I was on either glazed glass or gray rutted ice.

Soon I had slowed down to 15 MPH and was in line with other trucks that were trying to avoid spinning out. It was really dicey…just one touch of your brakes and you could jackknife. You can imagine what a helpless feeling it is to slide inexorably into a ditch at 4 MPH. Often we waited in huge traffic jams as spun out trucks struggled to get moving.

Of course the chatter on the CB radio was on-going. One guy summed the day up nicely. He said “OK fellows, just remember, keep the shiny side up and the greasy side down.”

In my ten hour shift I managed 147 miles. In that stretch I counted two dozen big rigs in the ditch. 5 had jackknifed, 4 others had skidded and turned over. All the other trucks had lost steering and slid into the ditch. There were probably 60 cars that were also stuck.

The ice was so slick you couldn’t even stand on it….trucks would spin 180 degrees and wind up in the ditch facing the opposite direction. The worst wreck was a deluxe refrigerated truck that had spun 180 then rolled over a number of times. The tractor was crushed and I am sure the driver was killed. The trailer had split open and the load had dumped on the road. Hundreds of heads of ice berg lettuce were strewn about…most of it frozen into the road surface. This trucker was just one of many that died in the storm.

In an eventful day, the most astonishing thing I saw was this. I was in a long line of slow moving trucks on glazed ice. Even at 15 MPH it was tough maintaining steering traction. Suddenly a fully loaded car carrier goes blowing by in the fast lane. He was probably doing 50. The guys on the CB were astonished….no one thought he would last long. In 30 years on the road, I would have to say it was the single stupidest bit of trucking driving that I had ever seen.

Sure enough, five miles down the road the car carrier had crashed. Not badly, it had just slipped partway into the median. There was already a cop car behind it, lights a blazin, to warn others of the blocked lane. As the truckers went by they blew their horns and waved to the idiot driver.

Andrew and I had to chain up twice. We were able to maintain traction quite well until we were forced to stop on a hill. When it came time to go again, our wheels spun uselessly. So we donned our winter gear, and dragged out the heavy truck chains. Few things are as amusing as lying on your back on the ice. You’re under the truck trying to get the frozen heavy chains into place…in the middle of a blizzard with ice water running down your back. But I guess that is what makes trucking so much fun sometimes.

Somehow we got through. When we got to Charlotte they were stunned. “You made it” Most of the cross country Fed Ex trucks were still stuck in the snow. With all the stuck trucks we had to go off our regular route and deliver “late loads.” From Charlotte we returned to the icy conditions of Dallas, then up to Memphis.

Super Bowl: From Memphis we were sent to Salt Lake. We stopped at a truck stop outside of Cheyenne Wyoming Sunday afternoon to watch the game. But alas, a winter storm had blown the satellite dish off the roof the night before. Now, presumably it was somewhere in the next county. We finished up with Sacramento and then, thankfully, we got home.