Commuter traffic was heavy and backed up on all the highway ramps at 1:30 p.m. with people headed home early to beat the rapidly falling snow. Providence Journal photo / Frieda Squires

Fast-falling snow crippled Rhode Island yesterday, transforming downtown Providence into a parking lot — trapping commuters and school buses filled with children for hours into the night — and creating such gridlock that more than 400 state snowplows could not manage to clear the roads.

Traffic jammed every major artery and most smaller roads leading in and out of Providence, encircling East Providence, Cranston, Warwick, Pawtucket and Seekonk. Many people reported commutes of up to six hours in the nation’s smallest state.

The storm that caused all the trouble hardly qualified as a record-breaker. As of 7:30 p.m., the snow in downtown Providence amounted to 6.2 inches, according to the National Weather Service. Compare that with the state’s biggest snow storm, in February of 1978, which dumped 28 inches downtown.

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Sean Donovan, Rumford, RI

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Sixty Providence public school buses filled with children still had not completed their routes by 8 p.m. yesterday. Providence police in their SUVs were fanning out through the Olneyville and Valley neighborhoods to rescue dozens of children still trapped on school buses. One bus reportedly had slid into a street pole and gotten stuck. Ambulances took two children who needed prescription medications to local hospitals.

Providence Mayor David N. Cicilline said it was “totally unacceptable” for some children to be on school buses for so many hours. When Cicilline was alerted to the problem, he established a command center to locate all the stranded buses.

“We dispatched police to every location with four-wheel-drive vehicles” to get the children, he said.

By 10 p.m., the police had managed to free nine busloads of stranded children, but at almost 11 p.m. they were still out helping more than 50 elementary schoolchildren left on the buses, a school spokeswoman said.

One anxious grandparent whose child was on one of the buses called the state’s emergency management director, Robert Warren.

“I’m just learning about this now,” Warren told a reporter at 9 p.m. “I’m working on the issue.”

As of 11:30 p.m., all of the stranded students were home.

Providence Emergency Management Agency Director Leo Messier said that the school bus situation is “inconvenient,” but that children have cell phones to call their parents and they “will get home eventually.”

Governor Carcieri yesterday was overseas, after visiting soldiers in Iraq. His spokesman, Jeff Neal, offered to make DOT Director Jerome Williams available at a news conference in the city late last evening, when the roads were still impassable. Robert J. Warren, executive director of the state emergency management agency, and Messier, of the Providence EMA, were answering calls from their homes last night.

All Providence public schools yesterday were dismissed early due to the storm; middle and high schools at 12:35 p.m. and elementary schools at 1:05 p.m.

Providence School Department spokeswoman Kim Rose said that “the storm came in more intensely and sooner than anyone expected…and the buses got caught up into gridlock.”

Elementary schoolchildren whose parents had not made it to the bus stop to pick them up, she said, were brought to a city bus yard to wait.

The National Weather Service forecasts snow, sleet and freezing rain starting tomorrow after midnight and through most of the day Sunday, tapering off Sunday afternoon. Snow accumulation is expected to be less than yesterday’s storm, but conditions could be icy and there is a possibility of coastal flooding.

In Providence yesterday, on side streets throughout the city, motorists abandoned their cars in the middle of roads — some hitching rides, others simply walking away. On Allens Avenue, Providence Journal reporter Linda Borg waited in traffic for two hours when she saw a woman get out of her car and walk away. Borg rolled down her window and yelled.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m looking for coffee,” the woman replied.

The abandoned cars blocked the roads, leaving the police no choice but to call for tow trucks to remove them to make way for snow plows.

“They can’t do nothing with the roads so bad,” said Bob Matarese, of Matarese Towing & Service in Providence, which towed 63 cars for the Providence police before their lot was full and they had to stop. He said his towers had to refuse about 75 calls for service from AAA and other motor clubs.

T.F. Green Airport remained open but many flights were canceled or delayed. Flights to and from Block Island also were canceled.

In Pawtucket, a privately owned sander truck broke down on School Street, causing more back-ups. Pawtucket Highway Supt. Ronald J. Leitao blamed part of the problem on the 22-ton weight limit posted by the state DOT two weeks ago on the Pawtucket River Bridge on Route 95, between Exits 27 and 28. The weight limits forced trucks on detours that intensified traffic jams and made plowing more difficult.

The Providence Place mall closed at 6 p.m. but dozens of people milled about window-shopping and strolled the skybridge, cell phones to ears, as cars skidded along the road below.

“My understanding is that this is definitely a traffic problem,” state DOT spokeswoman Dana Alexander Nolfe said. “We have 445 plows out there — full state and vendor services. And, um, its hard to get through when there’s much traffic.”

“People have been taking it slow and because of that…[there were] only reports of 10 accidents” to the state as of 6:20 p.m., said Nolfe.

None of the state roads were officially closed, but many were blocked by disabled cars and trucks, including a disabled tractor-trailer near the Thurbers Avenue exit of Route 95, which blocked two lanes and caused back-ups for several hours into the evening.

Despite the unremarkable amount of snow, the rate of the snowfall — up to two-to-three inches per hour, or six times the rate to be considered for a “heavy” snow warning — made it somewhat unusual, said National Weather Service meteorologist Rebecca Gould.

Gusty winds of up to 15 mph in Providence last night blew clots of snow onto motorists’ windshields, with visibility reported as little as 400 feet, or roughly the length of a football field.

Some of the biggest snowfalls were in the northern parts of the state, such as North Smithfield, which as of 7:30 p.m. reported 11 inches, and Cumberland, with 9.3 inches. Newport County reported just 3 inches during that time.

“It took me almost six hours to get home from Middletown” to Providence, said Journal reporter Karen Ziner. “It was the most frightening drive … I was getting out every 20 minutes from my car and standing on Route 195 cleaning the ice out.”

With staff reports from Michael P. McKinney, John Castellucci, Richard Dujardin, C. Eugene Emery Jr., John Hill, Brandie Jefferson, G. Wayne Miller, Tom Mooney, Katie Mulvaney, David Scharfenberg, Meaghan Wims and Karen Lee Ziner.

amilkovi@projo.com