Chicagoans began surveying the damage and digging out of the neighborhoods this morning, even as the flakes keep falling.

In the Pilsen neighborhood on the city’s southwest side, drifts are waist deep in some places along the unplowed side streets, the snow blanketing cars, just the antennas peeking out.

Laura Dilworth left home this morning when it was still dark outside to try to get to her job at the Wilmette post office. Three hours later she’d gone three blocks.

“Can’t get out of the neighborhood,” Dilworth said. Just getting back to her street was difficult. Neighbor Hector Quinones tied a rope to his Toyota Land Cruiser and pulled Dilworth along —for hours.

“She got stuck by my house,” Quionones said. “She couldn’t go back or forward. So I’m trying to get her home.”

This is teenager Juliana Loredo’s first big snowstorm. She moved to Chicago four years ago.

And with a day off school she was planning to try something she never got to do as a kid growing up in Mexico—play in the snow.