Icy roads in Florida: The historic winter storm of January 2025

4K CHASE VIDEO: Icy road mayhem in Florida

By DAN ROBINSON

Editor/Photographer

PENSACOLA, FL - A record-breaking, once-in-a-generation winter storm impacted the Gulf Coast from January 20-22. This is a log of the trip to cover this event in the capacity of a storm chaser/news cameraman.

January 2025 continued to go crazy with winter weather, this time in the form of a historic snowstorm not just for the Gulf Coast states, but for the Gulf Coast itself! My plan was to cover as much of it as possible from Texas through Florida, focusing on the freezing rain aspect of the storm. I departed for this 10-state, 2,300-mile trip on Sunday afternoon the 19th and stopped for the night in Beaumont, Texas, intending to start the next day just west of Houston and move east through the day. Models had been slowly eroding the freezing rain areas of the storm in favor of mostly sleet and snow, and when I awoke on Monday morning, the initial precip type in Beaumont was already a sleet/snow mix. Models at that point were also showing very little in the way of freezing rain with the storm in its entire swath.

I decided, then, to focus on the forecast record snowfall amounts from New Orleans to Pensacola, Florida. Through the early morning hours, models moved the onset of the snow earlier and earlier in the Florida panhandle and also had temperatures falling below critical (29°F) there by mid-morning. Icy roads in Florida are so rare that I decided to spend the entire storm in the Pensacola/Panama City areas. I wanted to try to catch as much as I could of what would likely be the only opportunity to document such an event in my lifetime.

I stopped briefly in Mobile, Alabama to shoot an icy bridge on the east side of town:

I then continued into Florida. Heavy snow was well in progress as I arrived in Pensacola, covering roads quickly. Despite the icy road event being in progress already, shooting it was not easy due to the extreme snowfall rates reducing visibility to near zero. I could not see anything more than a couple hundred feet away, meaning that any footage subject was going to need to be practically right next to me.

On Interstate 10 near Pensacola

Scenic Hills neighborhood

This state continued through the evening and after dark. At sunset, I decided to just call it a day and prepare for an early morning wakeup to cover the aftermath. The first day or two after a winter storm in the South is typically the craziest for icy roads. This is because everyone stays home during the actual storm. Then, afterward, lots of people come back out a little too early when the roads are still treacherous. In Florida where there is absolutely no de-icing capacity - not even a skeleton salting/plowing crew - this meant that the roads would be in their worst shape the following day. This is mostly due to the compacting/melt/refreeze effect of traffic driving on the snow that results in a polished block of ice in the middle of the road lanes.

As predicted, there was plenty of chaos on the roads in Pensacola as the sun came up. I spent the morning shooting on a small hill on North Davis Highway. This was my first - and maybe last - time observing a major icy road event in the middle of a population that had never even seen icy roads before, much less tried to drive on them. I spent half of the morning shooting video, and the other half helping drivers move off of the very slick compacted ice and onto the unpacked snow that would give them a little traction to keep moving:

Car loses control and slides off of the road

Showing stranded drivers how to move onto unpacked snow for traction

The footage I had captured to this point was what I consider to be the rarest and most unusual winter driving video I'd ever captured in my career (by virtue of its location).

Deserted Interstate 110

After about 7 hours of shooting, my video camera gave the indicator that both of the memory cards had filled up - a routine part of my job. I went back to the car to offload/back up the SD cards on my trip hard drives, then continue shooting. But when I put the first card into the laptop's reader, it sluggishly loaded the file list, then froze Windows completely when I tried previewing the first video. I removed the card and tried again - same thing. I dug out a USB card reader and tried that - again, same result. I then put the card back into the camera to use its playback function - but the camera flashed the dreaded "check card" error.

The SD card was dead.

Dejected and incredulous at losing that footage, I just packed up and started the drive home. I made only one more photography stop to get a drone shot of an icy bridge in Evergreen, Alabama:

In Montgomery, Alabama, I stopped to do some research on where to send the SD card and if recovery was even possible. I had seen quite a few places refer to a technician in Bridgeport, Connecticut as the country's best at recovering data on flash drives and SD cards. He was said by multiple sources to be the guy that other data labs send flash devices to when they had given up, so I thought I'd give it a try. FedEx was still closed in Montgomery - as were most other businesses - for the storm, so the closest open FedEx drop-off location was in Birmingham. I made it there just before they closed to get the card overnighted off to the lab.

A week later, I got word that the recovery was successful and was able to download the files that I thought I'd lost. A huge kudos and thanks to Jeremy from Recover My Flash Drive, his service and capability lived up to all I'd read about his operation.

Here is the video, icy roads in Florida:

Weather data highlights

A visible satellite image taken the day after the storm shows the snow swath:

The NOAA Climate Data center plotted this map of locations that set snowfall records (though pretty much the entire snow swath where more than 4 inches fell experienced record-breaking amounts):