Here are about 30 reasons, just from the last 48 hours:
CWB estimates that 21 people were taken into police custody during Wrigleyville's Saturday-into-Sunday St. Patrick's binge.
But there was only one tazing. (Rats!)
28 batteries were witnessed or otherwise confirmed by police. Few were formalized with police reports.
Ambulances took at least 17 people to area hospitals and officers were tied up with at least 19 calls from cab drivers who had disputes with their passengers over payment.
Here, now, are the notable moments in this year's green-laden blow out in the area (with a splash of Lincoln Park tossed in):
[Saturday,] 12:36PM - Huge party in an apartment, 600 block of Cornelia. It's big, it's loud, and people are urinating out the windows.
It goes on from there, and it doesn't even include yesterday's mishigos on Lake Shore Drive.
Some asshole with a gun and an arrest warrant has blocked the entire length of North Lake Shore Drive as every cop in Illinois tries to prise him from his car:
A car chase through the South Side and downtown involving a man wanted in connection with a murder in Georgia ended with a standoff between the man and police after the vehicle crashed on Lake Shore Drive on the Near North Side, officials and witnesses said.
According to Harvey Police Department spokeswoman Sandra Alvarado, the man in the vehicle police were pursuing is wanted in connection with a murder in Hampton, Ga. Alvarado said that at 12:24 p.m. today, Harvey police had been contacted by the Henry Country Sheriff's Office asking for help in locating a homicide suspect. Harvey police were given a description of the vehicle, its registration, GPS location and arrest warrant information on the suspect, who was wanted in connection with a March homicide. Alvarado did not name the suspect.
Harvey police located the vehicle, which fled from officers about 12:27 p.m., beginning a chase on highways and interstates in the south suburbs and on the South Side of Chicago. Eventually the vehicle ended up on South Lake Shore Drive, and then North Lake Shore, where it crashed about 1:10 p.m. near Fullerton Parkway. The dark-colored vehicle came to rest in the grass just to the east of the northbound lanes there and police were seen surrounding it with guns drawn, pointing at the vehicle.
This seems like an overreaction, but I'm not a cop. I will say that it took me nearly 90 minutes to get from Wilmette to home this afternoon, which happens when the 40,000 cars that would ordinarily go down Lake Shore Drive during that period instead go down Broadway, Clark, Halsted, and Ashland.
The incident is still going on about 800 meters from my apartment. I'll know it's over when the news helicopters bugger off.
Even though we have snow on the ground once again, the sun came out this morning, so my bus stop didn't look as grim as it did yesterday:
First, we get the worst cold and the most snow of any winter in the last 32 years. It even alienates many of its allies with its stubbornness in the face of popular (and meteorological) opposition, refusing to give up a fight it can't win. Finally, warm weather finally prevails, ending the snow's doomed effort to hold ground it will never be able to keep. This is Monday morning:
Then, just when we were loosening our scarves, Arizona hit this morning:
Winter, you're just making people despise you more. It's the middle of March already. Not only will you be gone and forgotten in two months, but an ENSO event is forming in the Pacific right now, so you won't even be back next season.
Go away, winter. You're obsolete, losing even your friends, and damaging the country.
Officially, at 1pm today, O'Hare reported no measurable snow on the ground.
And at 2pm, the official Chicago temperature was 11°C, the warmest we've seen since December 4th.
If only they weren't predicting more snow tomorrow...
In the hopeless war between spring-like warmth and the ice still covering Chicago, the heat has almost prevailed. Officially at 7am O'Hare had only 25 mm of snow left after an overnight temperature rise to 6°C.
The end is near. Those last few millimeters have no chance of surviving the day, between nearly 12 hours of sunlight and a predicted high of 14°C.
Still, today is the 71st consecutive snow-covered day here. No one under 30 has ever seen this in Chicago before. And it's unlikely anyone ever will again.
You had a good run, winter, but it's over now. Go home.
It looks like we're going to go 71 days with snow on the ground before it all melts. But a couple of subtle yet telling things have happened since I last griped.
First, the temperature has gone up since sunset, as forecast. It hasn't gone up a lot, but the influx of warm air from the Gulf of Mexico will continue through tomorrow, to the detriment of all the snowdrifts in Chicago.
It's hard to get your mind around how much heat the atmosphere moves around. A human being can generate about 6-8 megajoules as heat every day. (A food calorie is about 4,200 joules.) Your car or office can generate tens of megajoules to keep you warm. But when an air mass comes up along the Mississippi to Chicago, it's dragging so much energy that we need to review exponents. We're talking about petajoules.
Which brings up the second point. We're not talking about an inch of fluffy ice crystals on a flower. We're actually talking about megatons of ice covering...everything. Not snow; ice.
Take a 10m square of ice just 50 mm thick—meaning just about any square of lawn in the Chicago area right now. So, that's 100 square meters times 50 mm (0.05m), which yields just 5 cubic meters of ice. It turns out, to change just that small amount of ice—oh, wait, that's five tons of ice (do the math)—into water takes 16.5 gigajoules of energy.
Also, when the energy goes into melting ice, it doesn't go anywhere else. I'll hold off on the physics for the moment, except to say that energy can't be created or destroyed, so when it goes into changing the state of a large mass of water without changing its temperature, it's pretty much unavailable for anything else. (Physicists reading this, please be kind; it's close enough.)
This is just a long way of saying: those last millimeters won't go quietly. The last bits of "snow" that the official weather observers measure aren't really snow, they're ice; and ice takes a lot of heat to melt. (Snow is easier to melt because it has so little mass for the same volume.)
Still, if the temperature gets up to its predicted 14°C tomorrow, that's a lot of heat fighting a lot of ice. It might get rid of the official snow cover at the airport, even. And that would leave us with nothing more than the two-meter snowbanks pushed up by all the plows for the last ten weeks. Joy.
When we got a few centimeters of snow on December 29th, no one expected it would still be on the ground after we changed the clocks in March. Yet there it is, officially 50 mm for the last 24 hours.
The 11am temperature at O'Hare was -0.6°C, and the forecast calls for the temperature to pop up to 7°C this afternoon and then stay above freezing until Tuesday night—possibly even getting up to 14°C tomorrow afternoon. If the little snow we've still got can survive that onslaught, then I will be impressed.
And the best part about this forecast? I won't write anything more about how many consecutive days of snow we've had. You're welcome.
Snow-cover reports come out every six hours. (The next report is due at 1pm.) I'll post as soon as the ground is officially snow-free.
Just one more moan: It's 18°C and sunny in London. But I won't be there for almost two more weeks.
Update: At 1pm the official snow depth was still 50 mm, but the temperature was up to 2°C. I'll check back in six hours.
Yesterday Chicago got warm enough to melt almost all the snow. We had just 50 mm on the ground at O'Hare (not including the waist-high drifts along all our major streets) when the cold front hit overnight. We woke up this morning to another "dusting" covering every surface of the city, just enough below freezing to make us ask "why?"
The Weather Service promises 12°C on Monday, which should end our 10-week ordeal of boots and salty paws temporarily. But I won't believe we're through winter until we have a solid week of warm weather. And I have no illusions this will happen before the end of May.