The crossroads of the Midwest became a 16-mile-long parking lot as the season’s most severe winter storm left thousands of motorists helpless for 24 hours or more, many of them forced to spend the night in their cars awaiting a rescue that did not come until Tuesday afternoon.
Hundreds of travelers, who on a normal day would have breezed past Gary, Ind., without so much as a glance at the behemoth downtown Genesis Center, found themselves unintended visitors to the facility. They were stuck there until mid-afternoon Tuesday, guests of the Indiana National Guard and served by Red Cross volunteers.
Thousands of others remained stranded on the Indiana Toll Road, Interstate Highway 65 and the Borman Expressway, which backed up traffic on the Illinois side of Interstate Highway 80/94.
They were trapped inside their vehicles, unable to move more than inches at a time.
As they watched, the wind whipped snow back across roads cleared only minutes earlier by snowplows and salt trucks. Some of them spent 30 hours stranded in their cars, without food, water or warmth, with no access to a bathroom.
By Tuesday night, parts of the Borman and I-65 were barely passable, with salt and slush frozen into deep ruts that rendered the snowplows ineffective. And more lake-effect snow was predicted.
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That ordeal played out as Chicago-area residents still were trying to cope with the aftermath of the storm that wiped out electricity to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses. Some 70,000 Commonwealth Edison customers were without power late Tuesday.
Indiana officials blame the wind as much as the snow for the closing of I-80/94, one of the country’s major east-west highways and known as the Borman on the Indiana side.
“The wind patterns blew everything shut,” said Alden Taylor, spokesman for the Indiana State Emergency Management Agency.
Indiana’s Department of Transportation on Monday had 111 snowplows clearing roads in Lake, Porter and LaPorte Counties. But, unlike their counterparts in Illinois, the Indiana trucks could not keep up with the storm.
Taylor noted that it is not unusual for I-65 to be closed in a major snowstorm, but he could not explain why the east-west interstates fared so much worse in Indiana than in Illinois.
Overnight, the problems on the Indiana stretch of highway backed up into Illinois, leaving drivers stranded in a two-deep line of trucks and cars stretching four miles down the Illinois side of I-80/94.
At 2 p.m. Tuesday, trucker Don Hennings was still in Illinois parked near the Lincoln Oasis, resting his head on the steering wheel of his 18-wheeler. He hit the traffic backup at 10 p.m. Monday, long after the Borman had been shut down by the sheer volume of vehicles going nowhere.
Hennings was ravenous. Relief was so close, yet so far. He did not dare violate company policy and dip into the 27,000 pounds of bagels he carried in his rig.
And, although he was within sight of the oasis Burger King, conditions on the icy roads made him fear trekking up the ramp for a burger.
“I’ve driven all over the country, even in the Rockies in Colorado, and I’ve never seen anything this bad,” the 15-year over-the-road veteran said. “It was a little bit scary. It was really cold and very windy. It looked like a lot of people were going to get blown off the road.”
Hennings said he knew conditions were bad, but he had not heard any reports that the roads were closed.
Neither had Tim Roth.
Roth blamed John Grisham. The 31-year-old California native was driving from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to Cleveland and did not hear any weather or traffic reports. He had been listening to an audio copy of “The Rainmaker,” by Grisham.
But with a roast beef sandwich and a personal computer, Roth said the night was not all that terrible and much cheaper than a hotel.
“This is as good a place as anything to stay,” Roth said. “I’ll just chalk it up to adventure.”
Hennings and Roth were stopped before they got onto the Indiana section of the interstates. They may have been the lucky ones.
Virginia Williamson spent 30 hours sitting on the Borman. She was on her way from St. Louis to Toledo, where she was to bury her mother on Wednesday.
Distraught over her mother’s death, she was overwhelmed by the storm. Along with her adolescent daughter and the family Dalmatian, Williamson had traveled just 5 miles in 18 hours when a Hammond, Ind., police officer ordered her off the Borman and directed her to a nearby shelter.
Still hoping to get to Toledo in time, she protested that she wanted to stay on the highway, despite the fact that none of them had eaten since Monday morning and the traffic still had not started to move.
“It just wasn’t meant to be,” Williamson told her daughter through her sobs in their car. “Somehow, some way, things have to get better.”
She was hardly the only one to venture onto the crippled interstates.
Indiana state police officials were unable to stop them because the department lacks the staffing to station a car at every entrance and exit ramp on I-80/94 and I-65, said 1st Sgt. Steven Hillman. Gary Mayor Scott King blamed a communications problem between state and local police for the lack of coordination in getting local authorities to help to shut down the highways.
After nearly two days of battling nature, even the smallest victories drew cheers. Workers spent 38 hours trying to reopen the 7-mile emergency ambulance route that links the snow-covered town of Lowell with St. Anthony Hospital in Crown Point.
The snowplows and tow trucks had gotten through, but it was hardly the end of the work. The state called out the Indiana National Guard to help search for stranded motorists and rescue families held captive in their homes without power. The National Guard used snowmobiles and four-wheel-drive vehicles to negotiate the paralyzed landscape.
In Highland, Ind., more than 100 truckers and their rigs found a safe haven outside a Kmart department store just south of I-80/94 on Indianapolis Blvd.
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Kenneth Mika, Highland building commissioner, said the store’s large parking lot had been designated a staging area for truckers and motorists.
“It is a friendly place for them, where they can find food and catch their breath,” he said, “until better weather and driving conditions.”
The ravages of the storm also stretched into Michigan.
A lakefront home in New Buffalo, Mich., crashed into Lake Michigan on Tuesday morning after its foundation was eroded, according to The Associated Press. A police dispatcher in nearby Grand Beach, Mich., said area police had been sent to keep people out of several lakefront homes in New Buffalo before one fell into the water.
Although unable to confirm the fate of the home, Berrien County, Mich., emergency coordinator Jim Collis said several threatened homes in New Buffalo had been evacuated.
An official with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers told the AP that some people in Michigan have lost 25 feet of beach in front of their homes because of the recent storms.