The Short Story of Raleigh's Greatest Snow Picture
Is there a winter storm coming? Then it's time to re-live a really rough day in 2014.
It’s going to snow in Raleigh. Which means you are probably going to see this picture come across your feed sometime soon:
This shot has it all. A car on fire. A yard sale of vehicles. A woman nonchalantly making a phone call, as if she ordered the hit. If you want to make the point that Southerners can’t drive in the snow, you would start by silently sliding this picture across the table, folding your hands, and dryly saying: “Your move.”
This particular shot was taken on February 12, 2014 on Glenwood Avenue in Raleigh, just up the street from the Angus Barn. The snow started at noon and came down hard, and eventually was coated by freezing rain. Eventually, about 3 1/2 inches of snow came down. Things got really slick, really fast. Schools let out early. People tried to rush home before things got worse. Everyone was out on the roads at the same time. It was so bad that the Duke-North Carolina basketball game in Chapel Hill was postponed.
Right as the snow started to fall, Lindsay Webb left work at Blo Salon in the Brier Creek Shopping Center to head home. By that time, cars were already sliding off the road. None could make it up the hill. One had broken down right in the middle of Glenwood Avenue.
“Once we came over the hill, you could see ... most of the cars disabled or abandoned,” Webb told ABC 11 in 2014. “That vehicle was trying to make it way up [the hill] when its tires spun, its hood started smoking, and it lit up.”
Webb decided to turn around and head home another way, but not before stopping in the median and snapping a picture, which she texted to family and friends. One of them, her boss at Blo Salon, posted Lindsay’s shot on Facebook. It ended up getting more than 2 million views and made headlines around the world.
Lindsay eventually made it home, five hours later.
The next day, WRAL found the mystery woman on her phone: Michelle Everest of Raleigh. She was talking on the phone with a friend to tell her that her car was stuck. She didn’t even know about the image until a day later. “That's funny, like I'm 007,” she told WRAL.
That picture has incredible staying power. Every time there’s the threat of snow in Raleigh, it shows up, right on cue.
Anyhow, this one will forever be on the Mount Rushmore of Raleigh-specific memes, right up there with Drunktown guy and the airport clowning on its own name.
More North Carolina Winter Weather Rabbit Holes
Greensboro got freezing rain earlier this week. Surprise! Here’s why it’s the freezing rain capital of the Southeast.
Snow (and the pandemic) keeps cancelling the inauguration parties of North Carolina’s governors. We haven’t had one go off as planned since 2013.
No, they’re not gonna bury more power lines to keep them from getting knocked down by bad weather.
Southerners are better at this than you think.
It happens on like a 10-12 year cycle? I was in Raleigh in I want to say January 2002 and there were widespread power outages and huge traffic jams on I-40.
The best ever Raleigh snow related story was the hack of Channel 14 by the Wolf Web. https://attrition.org/archive/tv-hack/www4.ncsu.edu/