Anthony Marques, 10, of Lincoln, runs the snowblower as he helps his parents, Missy and Tony Marques, clear the driveway of their home on Old Louisquisset Pike yesterday morning.

The Providence Journal / Bill Murphy

State and Providence officials watched an epic traffic jam develop during Thursday’s snowstorm, but despite millions of dollars in new communication and emergency-response technology, they did little to communicate with one another or warn the public.

Even though the state Department of Transportation had cameras aimed at all the metro area highways, it never told the public that thousands of motorists were stuck in traffic that slowed to less than 5 mph for much of the afternoon and evening. As a result, many commuters struggled for three to six hours to get home.

The Providence school superintendent says a “breakdown in communications” kept him from knowing until 8 p.m. that buses still hadn’t taken about 100 Providence schoolchildren home, despite the fact that a school spokeswoman was broadcasting the problem on the 6 p.m. television news.

Warwick, using the same bus company, got all of its students home by 5 p.m. Why? Good communication, school officials said, with drivers creatively changing routes to skirt obstacles.

Even though the state Emergency Management Agency is staffed and equipped and trained to react to natural disasters, it never opened its emergency-operations center because officials said no one asked them to.

Lt. Gov. Elizabeth Roberts, who chairs the state’s Emergency Management Advisory Council, said she called for the EMA to open its center. But that wasn’t until 5:30 p.m. It was already too late.

Governor Carcieri was still in Kuwait during the storm. The governor left his chief of staff, Brian Stern, in charge. Stern said he had one “lengthy conversation” with Carcieri by satellite phone Thursday night.

“Really, his primary concern was, is this a loss-of-life issue? Or is this a major inconvenience?” said Stern.

In fact, there were no reported injuries related to the storm. But throughout the metropolitan area, so many cars hit the road at the same time that traffic slowed to a stop or a crawl at best, and the plows couldn’t do their jobs.

State police responded to more than 200 accidents. Hundreds of cars were towed after being abandoned. Some people were on the road for six or seven hours just to get from one part of Rhode Island to another.

Rhode Islanders were not alone in their misery. Gridlock struck cities across southern New England Thursday afternoon. The headline in yesterday’s Boston Globe read Snowy Standstill. The Telegram & Gazette in Worcester used one word, Gridlock. The Patriot Ledger in Quincy called it A Commuting Nightmare.

“There was gridlock everywhere,” said Charles Foley, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Taunton, Mass.

Foley said a series of developments made conditions worse. The snowfall was heavily touted as the season’s first significant storm. It arrived a few hours earlier than forecast. Schools released students at the same time many workers got out early. And when people got out of work at their normal times, they just added to the congestion.

“So everyone went out and the roads were just clogged,” Foley said. The congestion made it nearly impossible for plows to do their work.

One consequence was widespread fingerpointing among the various agencies that did and did not respond.

Stern, backed by state EMA officials, said yesterday they decided not to coordinate through the state’s Emergency Operations Center in Cranston.

Explaining that decision, Maj. Gen. Robert T. Bray, the guard’s adjutant general, said the operations center is only used for “multi-jurisdictional” events, such as hurricanes and severe flooding. He acknowledged that it was also used during the Tall Ships celebration, when sailing ships come to Newport and draw thousands to Aquidneck Island.

Saying that the traffic problem was confined to greater Providence, Bray said “statewide, the emergency was well-handled,” which is why, he said, the EOC was not triggered.

So, instead of using the state-of-the-art emergency operations center, the command center became the Transportation Management Center in the DOT’s Smith Hill office. Stern joined DOT Director Jerome Williams, a state police trooper and a handful of DOT employees there at about 7 p.m. There are about eight video screens in that room from which dispatchers direct plowing and towing when necessary, Stern said.

It was in that room that Stern and Williams supervised state government’s effort to rescue the city and state from gridlock.

They had more than 300 snowplows for the state roads. They began sanding and salting — pretreating — the roads at 9 a.m.

The trucks in the Providence area shifted from sanding to plowing at about noon. By that time, there was already more than an inch of snow on the roads, according to Williams.

“You can’t plow if you only have an inch of snow,” Williams said. “We were treating it with salt and sand until it becomes heavy enough and thick enough to plow it.”

But by then, traffic had already slowed to a crawl.

Stern and Williams said heavy snow was compounded with the early release of schoolchildren and employees at local businesses.

“Between 12 and 2 p.m., all of the sudden, the snow picked up,” Williams said. “We started plowing. People started leaving the city and we had gridlock on the roadways. You can’t get the plows through the roadways at the same time.”

NEARBY COMMUNITIES began experiencing similar obstacles, but they had more success in overcoming them.

Warwick’s mayor and schools superintendent were not available, but district directors stayed in the schools’ transportation office until the early evening, communicating with drivers by radio.

“There was so much gridlock, but the bus drivers, to their credit, really were terrific,” said Secondary School Director Victor Mercurio. “Many of them had to rethink their normal routes on the fly because they couldn’t get where they needed to go.”

Cranston got its 7,000 students home by about 5 p.m., according to Joel Zisserson, director of buildings and transportation for the city schools. The district had to send some buses as far as East Providence to pick up private school students.

The drivers knew to seek non-highway routes as much as possible in bad weather, he said, and were also in constant communication with him and each other via radio.

“They’d let each other know where the trouble spots were,” he said. Staying in touch with the drivers also enabled Zisserson to call for city sand trucks or plows anytime a bus ran into difficulty, he said.

He praised the Highway Department’s quick response to the buses and also credited the drivers for pitching in and picking up extra runs to make up for buses that were working their way back from other cities.

“My last bus dropped off its students at about 5:10 p.m.,” he said. “There was a lot to contend with — the roads were cold when the snow hit, so it started accumulating right away. And while some people might say we should have let the students out earlier, we always have to consider that we have many youngsters on free and reduced lunches and we try to make sure they get a chance to eat before they are sent home.”

In East Greenwich, certified nursing assistant Gina Guzzetta-Dalrymple was stymied at first when she attempted to check on a patient and couldn’t make it through the snow up the driveway off Frenchtown Road. After a few attempts, Guzzetta-Dalrymple drove to the Frenchtown Fire Station, where the response was quick from Capt. Richard Denice and Firefighter Joseph Richardson.

“They got on the engine and drove right over and dug out the driveway and then cleared a path to the door,” said Guzzetta-Dalrymple, who works for Bayada Nurses. “They were just glad to help.”

In Providence, conditions worsened. Once the highways backed up, Mayor David N. Cicilline said cars backed up onto city streets.

Had the city known how ferocious the initial snowfall was going to be, he said, it would have canceled school altogether.

“When the interstates jam up, we’re jammed up. It’s happened before,” said Providence Public Works Director John Nickelson. At the storm’s peak, the city had 81 plows at work.

MANY PLOWS had trouble reaching the city’s public works garage and salt pile on Allens Avenue, because it was so heavily clogged with traffic.

Cicilline said the city is going to look at ways to manage the flow of midday traffic out of Providence in future storms, perhaps staggering the departure of city and state employees, or of school employees and buses.

As most of the city shut down, Trinity Repertory Company made the show go on, presenting A Christmas Carol to a half-filled house. To reflect its gratitude to patrons who braved the weather, the theater provided free wine and beer. The storm caused the curtain to rise about 20 minutes late.

At Roger Williams Medical Center in Providence, about a half-dozen people who came to visit relatives ended up camping out overnight in the lobby. The staff brought them cider, cookies, pillows and blankets, said hospital spokesman Brett Davey.

Some people stuck in traffic on Chalkstone Avenue pulled into the hospital parking lot for a break. Staff members waved them inside for cookies and cider, Davey said.

The emergency room at Roger Williams saw the usual number of patients.

The same was true at Rhode Island Hospital. “It was pretty much a typical Thursday night,” said spokeswoman Nancy Cawley.

Rhode Island Public Transit Authority buses were soon running an hour or an hour-and-a-half late, according to deputy RIPTA Director Henry Kinch. And he said 18 buses had to be towed from various locations from its fleet of about 190 buses during the peak period. Some buses were unable to traverse hills.

RIPTA officials, including general manager Alfred J. Moscola, made periodic assessments from the road, “and we saw 30 or 40 people at a time waiting for buses,” said Kinch. “It was mainly due to congestion, and buses were backed up.

“From the customer’s perspective, it was far from a smooth operation.”

It is RIPTA policy to keep the buses on the road no matter how bad conditions are: at no time did the buses stop running altogether, said Kinch. Other transit districts pull their buses off the road in bad weather, he said, stranding passengers.

As he left for the night, Kinch saw how badly conditions had deteriorated.

“It was chaos. I saw two people in fisticuffs, about 7 o’clock at night,” on southbound near the mall, he said. “They were yelling and screaming at each other. I was trying to get forward. They were outside their cars.”

STATE EMA Director Robert Warren said no community or agency ever asked EMA for help during the storm. However, his agency also didn’t call any of the other cities and towns, or agencies, and ask whether they needed help.

It wasn’t until nearly 9 p.m. when an upset grandfather called the state EMA, that Warren learned about dozens of schoolchildren stranded for hours on buses in Providence.

He said he immediately called the city EMA director, Leo Messier, and offered the use of the National Guard to pluck the children off the buses and deliver them home. Warren said he also contacted the Rhode Island chapter of the American Red Cross about whether they could have hot cocoa and food ready for the children.

Messier said he turned down the offers because the Providence police were already out collecting children from the stalled buses. He had known about one bus that had broken down on Valley Street. It wasn’t until Warren called him that he found out there were actually 40 buses with children still out on the snow-covered streets.

The state EMA had contacted the school superintendents about the storm, but Warren said it’s up to the local officials to decide how they will handle their own emergency response. “They have to make decisions based on their reports,” Warren said. “I can’t make decisions on when to close the schools.”

He asked a Journal reporter if she could hear his frustration.

“It’s the age-old question in the state: Do I advise people not to go to work … and the storm doesn’t become an issue, and then I’m the bad person,” Warren said. “We try to put the information out there for people to make the right decisions.”

He said he hadn’t known about the traffic jams in Providence, which began at around 1 p.m., until several hours later.

At around 8 p.m. the lieutenant governor said she walked from her State House office to the DOT command center, again, to urge Williams and Stern to open the Emergency Operations Center.

“The governor, clearly, out of the country. But we were assured that DOT was in control and the situation was going to be managed,” Roberts said. “I share Rhode Islanders’ outrage at what happened yesterday. I don’t think it had to happen.”

Roberts, unlike the governor, has no power to issue orders. Before 1992, the state Constitution allowed the lieutenant governor to assume the gubernatorial duties when the governor leaves the state. But it was changed to give the lieutenant governor power only in the event of “death, resignation, impeachment or inability to serve.”

Roberts continued: “We have an emergency operation system in this state. It requires the governor’s office to activate it. But it then puts emergency responders, my office, the governor’s office, state police, all in a common planning process. You can coordinate services. You can communicate. And you can ensure we can respond,” she said. “I understand that at 10 a.m. most of us thought it was not going to be a major snowstorm. But if we’re going to respond to emergencies, we need to be able to respond to them as they unfold.”

With reports from Lynn Arditi, Daniel Barbarisi, Linda Borg, Felice Fryer, Natalie Garcia, Amanda Milkovits, Cynthia Needham, Barbara Polichetti, Steve Peoples, David Scharfenberg and Karen Ziner.

plord@projo.com