-48 air temp in Chicago?
Seems a bit of a stretch
http://www.crh.noaa.gov/lot/?n=chi_temperature_records
And i walked twenty miles to school in the snow uphill each way.
Telling me that someone did fine in a Chicago storm from years ago is meaningless. I too have survived ugly storms years ago. In those days I lived in an area that was used to getting extreme weather. People had snow tires and chains. The cities (such as they were) had snow plows and sand trucks.
For the entire STATE of Georgia there are 40 snow plows and 30 sanding trucks.
The state actually did a pretty good job keeping the roads from turning into ice skating rinks. With nearly a million and a half people on the road at once between the traffic jam and the dropping temps chaos ensued.
For all those who say ‘well in the good old days’... just remember I used to work at a place that locked the gates at 7:00:30 am, blew a horn for the ten am bath room break, blew a whistle at lunch, again locked the gates at 12:30:30pm, and sounded a double horn for the afternoon end. I was an ENGINEER at this place... the idea that somehow the old days were better is oft times delusional.
People keep forgetting - in the South there are no snow plows or salt trucks. When I lived in northeast Alabama we had 1 road grader for the whole county. I grew up in suburban Pittsburgh, where the roads would be cleared as soon after a storm as possible, but in Alabama they simply did not have the equipment to do it. They would be out in trucks manually shoveling sand onto the main roads, the side roads were on their own.