Sitting in her car on Lake Shore Drive on the night of Feb. 1, Julie Casserly knew something was wrong pretty quickly.

Driving home from her office in the West Loop, Casserly cut up LaSalle Street to North Avenue and over to Lake Shore Drive. Traffic slowly went from a crawl to gridlock.

But as she became stuck in traffic between Belmont and Diversey, she encountered a complication others stuck in traffic didn’t have to worry about:

Casserly was 39 weeks pregnant, and she began having contractions.

But Casserly was one of the lucky people stuck on Lake Shore Drive who got extra help. A good Samaritan who identified himself only as a Northeastern University professor came and dug her out of her car early in the evening.

On Feb. 3, Casserly was at the Soldier Field parking lot with her husband, Bill, picking up her car and getting out of the house while she waits for the baby.

“I went to the doctor this morning, and the labor process has already started,” she said. “Why sit at home? If I want this baby to come, I’ve got to keep moving.”

The process of finding her Lexus convertible wasn’t simple, but it wasn’t terribly difficult, she said. While the city kept an online database of where cars abandoned on Lake Shore Drive had been towed, not all of them were entered. Casserly had called 311 several times as the city recommended, she said, but her car wasn’t in the system.

So with Bill, she set out to track down the car, visiting one of the city’s other three parking lots at Wilson Avenue on the North Side, before finding out from a friend (who’d also been looking for a different stranded car) that her Lexus was at Soldier Field.

“I don’t think the city could have handled it any better,” she said. “I know everyone’s bashing the city, but they were trying to pull people out.”

But while Casserly was pulled out relatively early in the night — around 7:30 p.m., she said — few others trapped on the Drive were as fortunate.

David Nagelli, who works for the Chicago Department of Transportation, was trapped in his car until 4:40 a.m. on Feb. 2 before he finally abandoned his car.

“I was told there was no use,” Nagelli said as he cleaned off his car with his son, Eric.

Nagelli, a diabetic, was in medical trouble, too. When he was finally saved from his car, they had to take him in an ambulance — sitting in the car for so many hours, he simply couldn’t move his legs.

Though he took insulin four times, he needed a bit of medical treatment as they took him to the impromptu shelter set up at Malcolm X College on the Near West Side.

Eventually, Nagelli’s brother picked him up there and took him home, where he recovered.

Barbie Greiwe didn’t have any physical afflictions, but being stuck for so many hours took its toll on her.

“I left Hyde Park for Wrigleyville at 3:45 on Tuesday afternoon, and I realized, ‘This isn’t going to be a 25-minute ride,’” Greiwe said as she cleaned off her SUV in the Soldier Field lot.

As traffic ground to a halt after several hours of being stuck in her car, Greiwe began to freak out. So she started writing poetry.

“Really, it was just scary. The car was rocking and shaking, and it was lightning and thundering, and the winds were 70 miles an hour off the lake,” Greiwe said. “I was sitting there eating Smarties candy and then I started to cry, like ‘Oh God, am I going to die here eating Smarties in this blizzard?’”

Eventually, she was pulled out of the blizzard into a warming bus, which took her to Malcolm X.

There, she said, the American Red Cross asked for her poem as a memento from the storm.

Of the hundreds of cars abandoned on Lake Shore Drive last Tuesday, only four cars hadn’t been picked up as of 11:30 a.m. Wednesday, the city says. They’ve all been moved to the city’s central auto impound lot, at 400 E. Lowest Level Wacker Drive — which sits below Lower Wacker Drive, just blocks from where it all started.