Stray Hawkeye

This morning I left for work a little early because I had a 9:00 meeting that I was supposed to go to, and I wanted to be sure to get in early enough that I could start up my computer and catch up on any new emails before the meeting.  So, I left home around 8:20 or so, and headed over to 35W south to head to work.  Kind of the standard stuff – potholes, idiots who don’t know how to merge, a few people driving way too fast, a few way too slow, and, right around when I got to the Diamond Lake Road exit, a giant mushroom cloud of flames that was about 200 feet tall.  A little something like this (particularly towards the end of the video):

Except I was driving about two blocks away exactly at the moment of the initial blast, which was probably twice as high as the above.

My first thought was I should pull over and call 911, and as the though crossed my mind, 4 or five cars in front of me pulled over.

Okay, so really the first thought to cross my mind was something to the effect of HOLY F(*@ING S#!+ #%)Q ^&# $)^&!# ^)#@*$@ #)*^* ^&# !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.

Then, oh, I should call 911. Followed by, oh, those people probably have it covered.

Followed by, why is it so hot all of the sudden. Because in my car with the windows up, 2 blocks away (though straight downwind), going 60mph, it suddenly got really, really hot in my car. Like in a short sleeve shirt, no jacket, and sweating hot.

Followed by little bits of burnt, melty gunk falling on my wind shield.

My next thought was, hmm, I should get the #$%^ out of here, because though the inital fireball had gotten smaller (and by smaller, I mean what you see in the video above), it kept burning. And there not being much black smoke would mean some kind of fuel burning rather than a house or car or something. And if there’s one tank of fuel to blow up, there could be a bigger one next to it.

So, I kept driving to work and could see the base of the flame from the highway as I drove past, just like at the end of the video above, except from the other side and a little higher up. In case you’re not familiar with the area, it looks something like this:

The explosion happened when I was where the blue line starts, straight east of the fire was where it got really hot and I could see the base of it burning. Note this is pretty much exactly the chunk of highway that got shut down as soon as police could get there to block it off.

By time I got to work, I still didn’t know what exactly it was. However, I work a couple of stories up above the trees line and could still see it clearly from my desk, about 4 or 5 miles away. Okay, not quite from my desk, I’m not that close to the window. But if you stood up and took a couple of steps to down the row, you could see it from there. About ten minutes later reports started popping up on local news sites that there was a fire of some sort, and about twenty minutes after that that it was a gas main that exploded.

It burned for a good hour more after that, visible from miles away the whole time.

There’s a fair amount of coverage, pictures, and videos on the local news sites:

• Strib
• Fox 9
• WCCO

Also alternate titles for this post that are okay to laugh at now because we know no one got hurt:

• I was hoping for a spring warm up, but this is ridiculous!
• Minneapolis fails in bid for winter Olympics, but is awarded temporary custody of the torch as consolation
• Stay Puft Marshmallow Man Smores For Everyone!
• The Vulcan Krewe is really getting out of hand, well, more than usual
• Minneapolis starts new St Patrick’s tradition, falls to outshine Chicago’s green river (seriously, while standing by the window watching this thing burn from miles away, my coworkers started talking about how amazing the green river in Chicago is, and how bright of a green it is, you know, not dark like you’d expect, and how the boats go back and for to mix it up after the first boat FOR FUCK’S SAKE WHY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT THIS WHEN THERE’S A GIANT PLUME OF FLAME RIGHT FUCKING THERE!?!?!?)

So, hopefully the drive to and from work tomorrow will be a little less eventful.  Might stop and get a Shamrock Shake on the way home though.  So there’s that.

You may have heard we had a bit of snow here in Minneapolis.  Enough, in fact, to collapse the Metrodome (pretty cool video there).  So, what does any sane person do when there’s 16 or 17 inches of snow on the ground, 20-30 mile an hour winds, and bitter cold?  Go for a walk and take some pictures of course!

Pretty average car in a parking lot

If nothing else, it's sort of a cool shape for a hatch back. Unfortunately the car underneath was a sedan.

Street parking wasn't much better.

This is on Hennepin, and was about as good as any road looked.

You can see the plume of snow blowing straight sideways off of this roof - it was pretty much constant like that. If you look at the edge of the roof, there's an overhang of snow that's built up from the wind.

This is someone cross country skiing on Hennepin - on the road. There were a few people doing this, and a few bikes as well. Also note the complete lack of moving cars. There was one stuck about every two blocks on just about every street though.

I just thought this was really pretty.

And if you happened to be watching the Weather Channel at about 6pm Saturday, while they were talking to their correspondent in Minneapolis, you can see me walking in the background.  That settles it, I’m famous.

Also, while I was walking home, I was helping push a car that had gotten stuck in an intersection, the third one in five blocks.  As it got some traction and started moving my feet went out from under me and I slammed down on my knee.  I got up, brushed myself off, and kept going.  Then I heard someone from behind me yelling in a very Nelson from the Simpsons manner, “Haha, wipeout!  Hey Wipeout!  Hey WIPEOUT!! hahaha”.  Ah, Minnesota, always someone there to kick you while you’re down.

So, once I got back to my place and finally warmed up, my knee started hurting, a lot.  And it had one big spot where I had hit it on the pavement that was starting to bruise and swell a lot.  So, as a final indignity, I had to pack it in ice for a while.

While I was laying there, I heard a plow going through the alley to make a first pass at clearing it out.  When I looked out, it was actually one of those giant end loaders – the kind where the cab is about five or six feet in the air and has three foot tall tires and you sort of wonder how it fits under the phone and power lines.  In the course of trying to plow through our alley, or the part of it I could see, it got stuck and had to back up and make a running start to keep going.  Six times.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go limp out into the sub-zero wind chills and start digging my car out of the piles of snow the end loader and the wind left, so I can hope to actually have it out by time I have to go to work on Monday.  My car, unfortunately, does not have three foot tall tires.

Could someone remind me why I live here?

Anyone?

Anyone at all?

Continuing the driving theme I seem to have established over the past couple of days, the free idea this week is a Pothole Spotter website.

As bits of pavement are thawing here on the frozen tundra, the potholes seem notably worse than in past years.  Now, I’m no stranger to potholes, having lived in the upper Midwest my whole life, but some of the ones this year seem pretty exceptional.  Perhaps it’s the particular combination of weather this winter, or maybe it’s the result of reduced preventive maintenance on roads with budget cut back, I don’t know.  And mind you, I’m not talking about a little bit of pockmarked road acne here, I’m talking about the tire swallowing, axle breaking caverns.

I’ve got a few on my way to work that are so substantial that I’ve modified my usual route by a few blocks to get around them, because I’m worried I’ll end up with a flat tire one of these days if I don’t (again, these are no “just swerve around them” sized pot holes).

From what I’ve seen in past years here in Minneapolis, the city’s way of patching these is to methodically drive up and down every single street on the warm days, starting when it gets up to the 40′s or 50′s, and patch every single divot on a given street, from fist sized hiccup to black hole of death, all at once.  Which sort of makes sense in a “it’s the government” kind of way.  After all, how would they know where the really bad ones are?  Or the ones that the most people drive over in a given day?  And really, what are you going to do about it anyway?

Make a Pothole Spotter website.  That’s what.

The people who are going to know best where the really bad potholes are are the people who drive through them (or swerve around them) every day.  The commuters.  So, this week’s idea is to make website where users can submit their favorite / most hated potholes.  Ideally, you would set it up so they can send in picture messages of the potholes from their phones, so you can actually see how big / bad they are.  The users should also include a description of the location (for example, 31st Street E, about 10 feet west of Stevens Ave, all of the right lane), or maybe a Google Street View link (http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Minneapolis,+Hennepin,+Minnesota&ll=44.946643,-93.275565&spn=0,359.997299&t=h&z=19&layer=c&cbll=44.946644,-93.2757&panoid=dtMqU1RZFncbKp_RddLBew&cbp=12,30.94,,0,1.07 – those two close parallel cracks at the end of the white stripe have each opened into tire sized gaps in the pavement).

The commuters would have incentives to use the site, because it could potentially help them get the worst of the potholes they have to deal with fixed quickly.  Additionally, you could offer a weekly prize for worst pothole, and let users vote on it.  The worst pothole each week would be displayed at the top of the home page. It would strike me that you could get a tire company or an auto shop (especially one that does alignments and tire balancing) or a tow truck company to sponsor the thing, and give related / amusing prizes each week.

Additionally, it would basically publicly shame the cities / street maintenance crews that are in charge of the areas where the potholes reside into fixing them.  Or, more positively, help the cities and crews to identify where they can have the greatest effect improving drivers’ experience with the least amount of manpower and resources.

You could also pit cities against each other to introduce a bit of competition to it for both the government officials and the users, and maybe get a bit of press for it in the mean time.  “Will Minneapolis or New York have the worst pothole this week?”  “Hey, did you see Miami beat us this week?!?  They don’t even have winter!  We gotta get out and find some big ones!”

Additionally, this would also give the cities a good resource for concrete data (pardon the pun) about which streets have the most issues, which could drive the choices  on which ones get priority in replacement, as well as better analysis of layouts / materials that lead to the most / worst potholes.  It could also give the ability to track which spots have potholes that reoccur each year, which could lead to analyzing the effectiveness of patches done at different temperatures, at different times, or by different crews.  In that way, you even potentially charge the cities a small fee to mine the data, or sell some consulting to analyze the data for them.

People would have smoother commutes, the city would have a greater affect of peoples daily lives with fewer resources, we gather more data to prevent future problems and promote accountability, and have some potential to make some cash on the side.  Make it so.

In driving through the Crosstown Common (where 35W and 62 overlap for about a mile) I had a thought.  If you’re not familiar with the area, as 35W approaches the Commons it narrows to two lanes, and 62 narrows to one lane, and they combine to be 3 lanes for the length of the Commons.  62 merges on to 35W from the left, and then exits off the right.

So, most people on 35W who want to stay on 35W bunch up in the left lane of 35W as they approach the Commons, as that’s the only lane that remains 35W through the Commons.  In doing so, they form a bit of a wall, which is all well and good, except that anyone who is on 62 and would like to remain on 62 has to move from the furthest left lane to the furthest right lane in order to stay on 62.  As you can imagine, fun is had by all and traffic tends to back up in all directions around it.  (They’re currently doing some massive construction to try to fix this, but at the moment, it’s still very much intact this way.)

Now, on most days this is the low light of the commute, by far, especially given the merging skills of the average Minnesotan.  But today it occurred to me while driving through this mess that, really, the highways are just playing a large scale game of Red Rover.  It made me smile the rest of the way home.

On the drive home from work, I saw a Honda Civic with the following on a bumper sticker:

Think about honking

if you [heart] conceptual art

I think in terms of flair which defines my neighborhood (Uptown), that may well take the top spot.  It knocks off the previous favorite, which I saw briefly after moving here, which was on an old VW bus and said something to the effect of:

Zero to sixty

in about twelve and a half minutes