WILKES – BARRE, LUZERNE CO. (WOLF) \u2014 Fox56 reporter Ben Freeman traded in his khakis for his ski pants because on Sunday he drove all the way up to Dickson City and back to the station to see how bad it would be. And for everyone that stayed home, you made the right call.<\/p>\n
At around 3 p.m., with eight inches of snow on the ground, he hit the town.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m going to take you along with me as I go around town to be your eyes and ears for what the storm has in store. Let\u2019s go.\u201d<\/p>\n
Almost immediately, he got stuck.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was trying to go to different places and my car got stuck as I was trying to leave the parking lot. That\u2019s why I kept saying, don\u2019t leave. Stay home if you can. Do not travel, it\u2019s only going to get worse.\u201d<\/p>\n
And it only got worse.<\/p>\n
Next, he went to the Wilkes Barre\/Scranton Airport. All travel into and out of the airport had been cancelled, meaning the only people around besides snowplow operators were a pair of newlyweds who were on their way back home from their honeymoon. They had flown from South Africa to Newark when they decided to take a rental car home to Buffalo, New York. The trip was going well until their rental car broke down, and they ended up stranded in the airport trying to get a new one.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s really bad, no one\u2019s out. Just stay home,” said Mary Uselmann, standing next to her newlywed husband Cameron Schwier. “We thought we could beat it. We\u2019ve been trying to get home but the universe keeps telling us to just stay put. So, I think we should just do that now.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ben ended up giving them a ride to their hotel in Dickson City and on the way, the conditions were rough. I-81, while drivable, was caked with snow while many smaller streets and exits were barely plowed. Almost all businesses he passed by were closed and practically no one was out on the roads. Conditions were so bad that he started to see people riding snowmobiles and go-carts in the streets.<\/p>\n
By the time he made it back to the station, the sun had fully set, and the streets had gotten even worse.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m back at the station; I\u2019m back at highway 315 and my ride from Dickson city back to Wilkes Barre was about an hour. And it was a rough ride, there were a lot of places that were okay, and there were a lot of places kind of like here at 315 where there\u2019s just this buildup of snow where if you have a smaller car, you\u2019re going to be in trouble. I was slipping, I was sliding, it was a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n
And the whole time, the snow hadn\u2019t let up \u2013 it had risen about an inch over his three-hour drive and by 2 a.m. \u2013 its expected another 1-3 inches will be added.<\/p>\n
All in all, the roads were rough, the snow was nonstop, and the temperatures were absolutely frigid. He wouldn\u2019t recommend driving in these conditions at all and if you took his advice and stayed home, hopefully you were able to get a glimpse into what it would’ve been like if you hadn’t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WILKES – BARRE, LUZERNE CO. (WOLF) \u2014 Fox56 reporter Ben Freeman traded in his khakis for his ski…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":96888,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[178,180,179],"class_list":{"0":"post-96887","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-scranton","8":"tag-scranton","9":"tag-scranton-headlines","10":"tag-scranton-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96887"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96887\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/96888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}