As you probably know, people in the Deep South are unaccustomed to snow. After we emigrated to the United States, I grew up in the North, so I learned how to drive in snow, dress for snow, make snowmen, wax sled runners, etc. But, I was not aware of just how unaccustomed to snow the people are in the Deep South. On Thursday, it began to snow in Birmingham about 1:00 pm. One would have thought that a Category 5 hurricane was bearing down on the city! Suddenly, the streets outside of the hospital were in utter gridlock. It looked like every professional and university student in the downtown area was trying to get out at the same time.
The scene was incredible. People were driving across intersections as the light was going from yellow to red, even though there was no place for them in the lane across the intersection. This meant that they were stuck out in the intersection blocking the cross-road traffic. And they had done this as a deliberate act. You could watch anger level risings and pedestrians nearly getting hit by cars that were turning, even with pedestrians in the crosswalks. It was a horrifying sight. Since the hospital is in an university area, and part of a multi-block university complex, one could not even argue that these were bourgeois or poor folk. No, the folk running amok outside our windows would have been highly trained professionals, university students, faculty, etc. And, yet, they behaved in the worst possible manner.
The odd part, as every emergency coordinator knows, is that had they maintained their cool and simply kept intersections clear and obeyed the traffic rules, the traffic would have actually flowed significantly faster than it did. But, no, they behaved in exactly the same way as many of the people trapped in the gridlock would have derided had they seen it in a news report about another country or another state or another class of people (say the poor or working class). And, as every emergency coordinator know, it is precisely this type of behavior that makes a community-wide emergency much worse than it needs to be.
Nevertheless, I did find some humor in the situation. Though the report above is from the first snowfall–last Thursday was the second this year with a possible third next week–it does capture in a rather humorous way the completely flabbergasted reactions of a Southerner to what is normally a Northern event. I think the lady in the video above needs a hug. A big thank you to a friend from a long time ago who posted a link to this video on Facebook™.
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