Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Here's the thing: my section of Lombard St. is a very slight uphill stretch. Doesn't look like much, doesn't feel like much, but it's enough to make the spot right in front of my house a real problem for cars today. (Maybe this'll make me curious enough to find a protractor and measure the slope of the street.) What's on the road is slippery enough that it doesn't take much of a hill if you lose momentum for whatever reason.

This time it was a Baltimore city police car spinning its wheels in front of my house, with an ambulance behind it. One officer driving and another pushing. Took them between five and ten minutes to get through the intersection, based on when I started hearing the spinning-wheels noise. (When I looked and saw it was a police car, I figured maybe I should throw on some clothes and brave the cold again to lend a hand, but they got it moving just then.)

(As of a few hours ago, Lombard was a half inch deep in tire tracks, four inches deep in the rest of the shallow center section, and a foot or two on the sides. Fulton was an inch deep in the tire tracks, two or three inches outside of the tire tracks, and looked similar to Lombard outside of the plowed part. Fulton's been plowed several times; I only caught that one pass by the front end loader (not as much fun to say as Big Yellow Thingie) on my block of Lombard, though the next block got plowed by a truck at some point.)

Television news reports are a little vague, but it sounds as though the governor's ban on non-emergency travel doesn't apply to city streets. Of course, the mayor has asked folks to stay of the road in Baltimore as well.