A typically two-hour commute instead turned into a day-long ordeal for Virginia Sen.Tim Kaine, as the lawmaker was amonghundreds of drivers who were strandedon Interstate 95 overnight Monday into Tuesday after a snowstorm caused extreme delays.
Many people were stuck in standstill traffic for over 15 hours and forced to spend the night in their vehicles — while scrambling for enough fuel for warmth as well as dealing with a lack of food and water.
Kaine, 63, detailed his own struggles on Twitter, which he wrote at 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday had lasted 27 hours.
“I started my normal 2 hour drive to DC at 1pm yesterday, 19 hours later, I’m still not near the Capitol,” Kaine wrote Tuesday morning. “My office is in touch with @VaDOT to see how we can help other Virginians in this situation. Please stay safe everyone.”
“Bless them!” Kaine wrote.
He later wrote that he was “frustrated, but not in serious trouble,” though the frustrations likely mounted as the wait continued.
“Update: I’ve been on the road for 27 hours,” he wrote Tuesday.
Kaine did finally make it to the U.S. Capitol, sharing a photo of the parking lot around 4 p.m. Tuesday and writing: “Ok after 27 hours on the road from Richmond to DC, very happy to be back in the Capitol and working on voting rights legislation this afternoon.”
State officials said late Tuesday afternoon that there were no more stranded motorists, according to the Associated Press.
The former Virginia governor — who served asHillary Clinton’s Democratic running mate in the 2016 presidential election — shared more of his trip withThe Washington Post, saying in an interview from his car: “It was cold. It was very cold.”
He said he napped for “15 or 20 minutes” at a time, waking up because he got too cold.
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Mealtime, meanwhile, was replaced with a snack of the liquid variety.
“The only nourishment I had — if you count it as nourishment — is two cups of coffee and a Dr Pepper,” Kaine told thePost. “I’ll deal with hunger rather than eat a lot of food and have to worry about bathrooms.”
Inan interview with CNN, he said that “at some point it switched from a miserable travel day into kind of a survival mode day for me.”
“The roads are incredibly slick, and my car is sliding around and I don’t have food or drink in my car, so I was more focused on, ‘Okay, how do I safely get out of this mess?’ " Kaine said.
“You’re like trying to keep fuel. You’re trying to research what you can about what the roads will be like when the sun comes up,” he told CNN. “So it wasn’t boring.”
Kaine acknowledged that there are likely to be “a lot of questions” about how the chaotic congestion unfolded. He said he believed it was chalked up to unfortunate weather conditions. And he said he was appreciative of some of the smaller human moments while he and the other drivers were biding their time.
“You’d get out to stretch your legs. It was a clear night. ‘Oh, yeah, there’s Cassiopeia. There’s Orion’s Belt. There’s the Big Dipper.’ You know, we were sharing a gallows experience,” he told CNN.
source: people.com
