Snow strands buses, leaves SEPTA ‘falling apart at the seams’

There's not much to do when you're stuck overnight on a snowbound SEPTA bus.

You can sleep. You can talk on your cell phone - until the battery dies, that is.

If you're as lucky as bus driver Tammy Suter, the neighbors will bring you some coffee and let you use the bathroom.

But in the end you're really just "waiting for a tow truck - or the sun," said Suter, who spent more than 14 hours with her Route 108 bus stuck on a hill on Chester Avenue at 69th Street in West Philadelphia.

And which came first?

"The sun," she said.

The morning thaw finally enabled Suter to get unstuck and drive away about 11:30 a.m. Thursday. She had been there since about 9 p.m. the night before.

"And I was almost done," she said. "I was at the end of my run."

Suter, a driver for more than two years, was quick to note that she was just one of 150 SEPTA operators forced to spend the night on their buses - a small part of the transportation misadventure caused when 15 inches of heavy, wet snow falls in a six-hour clump.

Operators are required to stay with their buses when they break down or get stuck for the safety and security of the bus and the public, said Michael Liberi, who runs SEPTA's surface operations.

The storm began with a layer of wintry mix that froze on the roads, followed by snow that fell at a rate of 2-to-4 inches per hour from nightfall to midnight.

Roads quickly went from fine to treacherous, leaving motorists unable to navigate streets piled with snow on top of ice and rendering even the slightest inclines nearly impassable.

The woes continued well into Thursday morning, with buses and trains forced to suspend or curtail service through at least midday.

Nearly 3,000 people had called AAA by 4:30 p.m. Thursday, more than 900 of them asking to be towed out of the snow, said Rick Remington, spokesman for AAA-MidAtlantic.

Ernest Rogers, a SEPTA operator whose Route 22 bus was stuck all night at Broad Street and 70th Avenue in West Oak Lane, described a "black ice phenomenon" that "coated the whole street."

"It was a recipe for disaster," he said. "Not only buses, but cars - everyone had a tough time of it last night."

Rogers began his route at the Olney Transportation Center with 40 to 50 people. When he got stuck, many passengers transferred to another bus that also got stuck. There were four buses stranded in a three-block stretch, he said.

SEPTA officials said a handful of people spent the night on one of those buses, at Broad Street and 71st Avenue.

When a storm of such ferocity hits, SEPTA, as the region's primary mover of people with 1.1 million riders a day, feels the biggest impact.

Ron Hopkins, the head of SEPTA's control center, watched on a digital screen Wednesday night as bus after bus got stranded.

"We knew we were falling apart at the seams," he said.

SEPTA decided to begin shutting down suburban bus service within the hour.

During last year's winter storms, SEPTA drew criticism for failing to give passengers adequate notice of service changes. Despite the worsening conditions, officials elected to keep bus service within the city running until 11 p.m.

"I would have shut it down an hour earlier, if I had to do it over," Hopkins said.

Some of the 150 buses simply couldn't get traction on icy roads; others were blocked by stranded cars. One bus in Manayunk actually was plowed in by city crews.

The drivers kept their engines running throughout the storm to stay warm, Liberi said.

"They were telling me they couldn't see more than ten, twenty yards in front of them," he said.

Six service crews struggled to reach all the buses. At dawn, 65 remained stuck. By noon, 18 still were waiting to be freed.

The rescue came for Rogers about 7:15 a.m., when a towing crew finally reached him. He had passed the night with a little prayer and a lot of reading.

"A good operator always keeps a little reading material. I had a book and I was warm," he said. "You got to be patient in these situations. Eventually, they came. I knew they would."

SEPTA couldn't say how many passengers were on the stranded buses. Other than the handful in West Oak Lane, passengers simply got off and found another way home.

Suter, the operator stuck in West Philadelphia, said her passengers were given free transfers to the trolley and the Market-Frankford El, but supervisors came in vehicles to take some elderly passengers to the 69th Street Terminal.

Her bus was one of two stuck side-by-side.

Rogers, an operator for more than 17 years, heaped praise on his colleagues, not only for their steadfast performance during the storm but for their normal duties of moving so many people.

"They did their jobs last night and they did them well in some extreme conditions," he said. "It's about what my peers do on a daily basis. They do it so well, people take it for granted."