Yeah?
And?
I was a 20-year old snot-nosed little shit who had just been hired in at the Boeing Company back in 1990. I was working down at the Renton, Washington plant on the 737 and 757 lines. A few days before Christmas we had what they called an Arctic express (probably what they called a polar vortex before they blamed glow bull whining for it) rolled into the area (it started out about 32° at 06:00 that morning, and the temps dropped like a rock from there - 25° at noon).
My boss sent us home about the time there was 4 inches of snow on the ground, at 3:00 that afternoon. I had gone out during my lunch break to put the tire chains on my car, just before the snow started falling, and, having heard that the I-405 was like a pin-ball machine already, I took the surface streets from Renton up to the Coleman Dock ferry terminal to Bremerton. That's normally a 30-minute trip, and it took 2 hours that day. I sat another 90 minutes at the ferry terminal, because the snow was delaying the ferries as well, and finally loaded up at about 7:00pm on a boat that was slated for departure at 5:55pm. I was literally the LAST car loaded on for that trip, and I breathed a sigh of relief, believing that the worst of my winter adventure was over.
Not by a long shot. The Pacific Northwest has got it's share of spectacular sights, but it's thunderstorms aren't normally one of them. I think it's because of the moist, marine climate, but there aren't a whole lot of the beautiful cloud to ground lightning strikes that we normally associate with thunderstorms. Well, this storm - I don't know why it was so different - was a thundersnow storm and as we pulled out onto Elliott Bay, I was watching cloud to ground strikes on Queen Anne Hill from the ferry's fantail.
Then, one stroke hit apparently just the right spot, because I watch the bolt hit, and after that ALL of Seattle went dark. It was like - all of a sudden - somebody threw a switch, and anything off the edge of the car deck ceased to exist. I had never seen a night so completely black in my life.
The rest of the trip was no more anticlimactic than anything that had gone on before. Throw in sliding off into a ditch (tire chains are of limited use on an ice-packed hill), getting pulled out again, and slowly, and carefully inching my way home, and I gratefully pulled into the driveway about 11:30pm. 8 hours after I left work, on what was normally a 2-hour commute (including 1-hour on the ferry).
Glad you and yours made it home safe and sound.
