The airport is closed. Interstate 94 is closed in both directions. No travel is advised on any other road for over a hundred miles around. "No Travel Advised" is code up here for "we'd close the road, but we haven't got enough cops to spare". Schools, West Acres Mall, clinics, shops, factories, and for that matter just about everything is closed. But Amtrak came through for the Red River Valley with both the eastbound and westbound trains making all their scheduled stops in Fargo, Grand Forks, and across North Dakota and Minnesota. The westbound was 30 minutes late and the eastbound was 45 minutes late though... Even railroads have to slow down a bit to unstick frozen switches and sweep the snow off of signal lights so they can see them.
Welcome to the wild and wacky weather of the Red River Valley...
This storm hit early, with Interstate 94 being closed due to blinding snow yesterday, 12 hours before the Blizzard warning was even scheduled to start. It's not leaving any too quick though, with snow only now starting to moderate from "heavy snow" to "snow" or even "light snow" in the tail end of the storm in South Dakota. While the blizzard warnings in North Dakota are scheduled to drop at 1 am tomorrow, they just announced that Interstate 29 from the SD/ND border to Grand Forks will be closing for the night. Further northeast along the storm track, Frostbite, er, International Falls has already been hit with over 8 inches of snow with plenty more storm to come.
Some links:
Grand Forks National Weather Service (most relevant) winter storm page- http://www.crh.noaa.gov/...
Aberdeen, SD NWS winter storm page- http://www.crh.noaa.gov/...
Minneapolis NWS winter storm page- http://www.crh.noaa.gov/...
NODOT travel info page- http://safetravelusa.com/...
Veteran and budding Road Geeks can click on the "RWIS" tab for more geeky data and webcams.
SDDOT travel info page- http://safetravelusa.com/...
MNDOT travel info page- http://www.511mn.org/...
MNDOT RWIS page (preferred by road geeks, but may crash due to our republican governors goring of MNDOT)-
http://rwis.dot.state.mn.us/
Fargo Forum newspaper- http://www.inforum.com/
KFGO radio- http://www.kfgo.com/ (Only Fargo station with 24 hour streaming, carries Ed Schultz's local show in the morning.)
Well, Kossacks of the northern plains and beyond, any comments?