Rain makes commute a fright

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t use this space to whine about a miserable commute. I grouse in the interest of safety, and because so many of us Monday were in the same — excuse the cliche — boat.

I live two minutes from work, but drive every other week in a carpool to my son’s high school. We had left at 6 a.m. and navigated I-5 through solid rain.

Even in the HOV lane, the drive to Seattle was a tense crawl. It was still dark when I dropped my cargo of big kids and headed north with a little kid in back buckled in his car seat.

With all the standing water, the speed limit was too fast. I was going about 45 mph. I didn’t dare take a hand off the wheel to sip my tea.

The radio was on, and I was alone enough to sing. As Jewel’s latest played, my 3-year-old slept through his mom’s ragged rendition of "Standing Still."

Then WHAM, it hit — a wall of water. My windshield wipers, at full speed, couldn’t take the deluge. In a scary instant, my heart nearly stopped. My view was as murky as the vista out a porthole of the sinking Titanic.

Fearing everything, I saw nothing, not the cars ahead or around me. I jerked my foot off the gas, kept my minivan straight and held my breath.

A few wiper swipes and I could see, thank God, that I was still in my lane and surrounded by a cushion of space. I cursed the hulking vehicle that had zipped by flooding all in its wake and hoped never to be that spooked again.

We worry a lot around here about the prospect of snow. Forecasts that even hint of snowfall send nervous drivers in search of chains. We close schools and walk when weather turns wintry.

Rain? We’re used to it, drizzle to downpour. We think we know how to drive in it.

But listen to traffic reports on any soggy commute. We’re a bent-metal mess in the rain.

"It’s common sense, but everybody needs a little reminder," Washington State Patrol Trooper Lance Ramsay said of ferrying our cars around the rain-soaked region.

The No. 1 cause of accidents in the rain is "following too closely," Ramsay said, describing a scenario much like mine Monday.

"When a vehicle goes through water it splashes up on another vehicle; then that car slows drastically because the driver can’t see. When you can’t see, your first reaction is to hit the brakes," said Ramsay, who works at the patrol’s headquarters in Marysville.

"The person following doesn’t know that maybe the windshield just got covered on the car ahead of them and they impact into that vehicle.

"The car behind has to have enough room to notice and stop without impact," he said.

Ideally, he said, the distance between cars should be enough for a driver to say "one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three" in the time it takes to cover it.

"Everybody knows that in the metro area, having that distance is almost absurd. Everybody’s in a hurry," Ramsay said.

The other rain danger is hydroplaning, when a vehicle’s tires lose contact with the road and skitter on the water surface.

"You don’t want to hit the brakes," Ramsay said. "The best thing is to feather the brake, use just enough pressure that it doesn’t lock up."

In training, troopers drive in a "skid pan" covered with an eighth of an inch of water. At higher speeds, when you hit the brakes or turn the wheel "your wheels aren’t connected to the ground; it doesn’t do anything," Ramsay said.

Again, slow down, feather but don’t slam on brakes, and leave enough space, he said.

If someone is hydroplaning and hits a barrier, a trooper would likely find that driver was going too fast for conditions, Ramsay added.

And Monday’s commute, I asked, wasn’t it awful?

For a wet day, "nothing out of the ordinary," he said. There were accidents.

None, luckily, involved me.

Contact Julie Muhlstein via e-mail at muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com, write to her at The Herald, P.O. Box 930, Everett, WA 98206, or call 425-339-3460.