SCRANTON, Pa. -- It's safe to say most of us had a rough start to winter, but Steve Vonbergen of Scranton says he's in the running for having one of the worst days. He pulled into the Sunoco station on Davis Street on a donut.
"Yeah, I don't know, just from spinning and spinning and spinning, the tire just popped right off the car, so, yeah, it was a pretty bad day yesterday."
Vonbergen was one of many drivers who got stuck in the November snow. Thousands were stranded on highways across the area and commutes that usually take minutes took hours.
"It was horrible, like, they weren't even out touching the roads or nothing, nothing was done with the roads. It was terrible. It's so aggravating."
"My best advice, if today was like yesterday, I would not be coming outside today. At all," said Nicole Dinardo.
Hindsight is 20/20 and that's PennDOT's perspective, too.
PennDOT officials say the timing of the storm hitting right around rush hour as well as the rate at which the snow fell -- sometimes a few inches an hour -- really hindered efforts to keep state roads clear.
PennDOT says that in some places, its trucks were tied up clearing the roads of vehicles instead of clearing the roads of snow.
PennDOT spokesperson James May says staff watched it all unfold inside the incident command center in Dunmore.
"Sometimes we could see that there were nine or ten trucks that were all stopped right there on the road," May said.
May says if PennDOT had known just how intense the storm would be, it likely would have banned tractor-trailers from interstates.
"It's easy for us, even me, to look back now and say, 'well, if we would have known two days ago that it was going to be this intense, coming down at this rate of snow, coming down at the time that it did, that it was going to be this intense of a storm.' Would we have put a truck ban in place earlier? Or on more roads? Probably."
For the drivers who had to abandon vehicles along the sides of roads during the height of the storm, police say if they are not moved by Friday night, they will eventually be towed.