Rick Donoghue thought the drive home from a vacation in Florida would be an easy one. He knew there was some winter weather, but he didn’t know how quickly conditions would go from bad to a complete standstill. “We came to a stop and put it in park,” Rick Donoghue of Lewisville said. “The n that’s where it just began. I mean, literally nothing happened for a solid eight hours.” They waited hours with no updates and no idea why traffic stopped. “My wife had started having anxiety,” Donoghue said. “People around us were having anxiety. People were wondering what was going on. There was no information. It really got kind of scary once it got dark.” As a former first responder, Donoghue was concerned for what was happening around him. “There were probably two or 300 people, I guess, trapped on the highway,” Donoghue said. “We didn’t see anybody driving around, passing out water, checking on the elderly, the cold, or anybody.” On other parts of the interstate, that was happening. Louisiana State Troopers conducted welfare checks, delivering donated supplies, and escorting motorists off the interstate to gas stations or shelters. The Louisiana Guard also used heavy-duty wreckers to move big trucks to get traffic flowing again. “Once the traffic started moving, it just kind of started moving,” Donoghue said. He said from now on, he’ll be a little bit more prepared for that next road trip. “But reflecting on it, everyone always tells you be prepared, have warm blankets and water and food when you’re going on a trip, and you never think it can happen to you, but it happened to us and I would have never thought it would happen to us,” Donoghue said. ...read more read less