People around Lake County have been anticipating winter storm Bruce since last Wednesday. For awhile there, the predictions on when it would hit and how much snow would arrive kept on changing. Yesterday, it felt like I could just head over to my Facebook newsfeed if I was looking for weather forecast and school closings. My dread of what to expect was really taken up a notch when I noticed announcement from a few different places about closing up early yesterday because of the impending storm.
To get an idea of how hard this storm hit (and to do some photography), I started my day by taking a walk to downtown Waukegan. I was happy to find that it was not nearly as bad outside as many forecasts predicted. I’ve heard that other parts of Lake County were hit with more snow, but it’s not too bad here. I’d say that the worst to come from this storm is that some folks in Waukegan have lost power.
The schools in Waukegan got a snow day today because there was some worries about how much snow we would ultimately be getting. I’m always a little jealous of the fact that it seems like schools in Waukegan have had so many snow days in recent years. I feel like in my time going through the schools in Waukegan, snow days were extremely rare. I almost believe that I had more snow days in my last semester of college than in all my years going through Waukegan schools.
I will always remember those snow days during my last semester of college because they were all thanks to the Snowpocalypse. There are those rare breed of snow storms where people still talk about even years after the fact and this was one of them. This storm kicked off February 2011 by dumping nearly 2 feet of snow and having some winds up to 60 miles per hour. It was truly a storm that wreaked havoc and brought many things to a halt.
My experience with the Snowpocalypse was slightly less intense than the Chicagoland area since my college in Peoria, IL, is generally a little warmer since it’s a little further south and not by a lake so there was not additional accumulation due to the lake effect. However, it still had much of the same impact in Peoria as other places and shut most everything down including my college, Bradley University.
For me, it really became a bit of wasted week for academics since I was at a strange point in my college career. At that time, I had only one class and in an attempt to save money I was trying to live back in Waukegan and crash on a friend’s coach when I visited campus to attend my class. I got back to campus that week late Monday night since the class was in the afternoon on Tuesday and Thursday. However, the next day the storm ended up hitting and lead to classes being canceled from Tuesday through Thursday.