Big Snow Storm

Hahahahaha.

Typical news.

They were expecting some sort of record with 16-20 inches of snow.

What do we actually get? 6 inches.

I cant wait for everyone to start bitching at the news going "YOU HAD US ALL WORRIED!"

It snowed persistently all day yesterday, then stopped. It freezing-rained all this morning, then more or less stopped, but the university closed for the day and almost everything is covered in ice.

And now, There Is Another.

edited 2nd Feb '11 11:37:19 AM by FrodoGoofballCoTV

Fuck, brownouts. Well, if I suddenly drop off a few times today, it's because my router and modem went down the the electricity.

It is not snowing anymore in Northern Texas, but the snow and ice are still every where. It might snow again Friday. Heh, I may not have classes for the rest of the week.

Either I am raging, or just a bit jealous: What is stopping you from getting proper tires, getting a plow to driver around 5 in the morning clearig the road, shoveling some snow in the afternoon?
And to avoid the mess I got into last time I said something here: Not Alaska, but Norway. South and coastline got it pretty nice in this country, but there is still snow everywhere.
I even hear horror stories of entire airports being shut down for entire days or weeks because of a measly centimeters of snow, while that is a completely normal condition up here in the north half of the year: It is actually expected to be used 10 minuttes to clean the entire mess up.

Big nothing for me. It's a few inches... oooOOOoo.

EDIT: Also, that's what she said.

edited 2nd Feb '11 1:18:57 PM by breadloaf

The snowstorm seemed a little hyped up, but still...

IT'S BIG!

Del Diablo, it's that this is a lot more snow all at once that most of the places need to deal with on a regular basis. And in some cases, it's towns that rarely if ever get more than fractions of an inch all winter. I'm in Western Illinois. We got fourteen and a half inches of snow in something under 8 hours. That's more than we got during all of January combined. We've got the infrastructure to deal with six-to-8 inches in a day or so. We don't have the infrastructure to deal with twice that amount in a third of the time. Add in the blowing and drifting conditions and it means that a lot of the roads that were plowed didn't stay plowed — the plow banks served as snow-fences and build up more drifts back out into the road. There's also a limit to where you can push that much snow to; Chicago is having problems not because they don't have the equipment and manpower but because they have so many miles of roads that they can't just shove it to the side and call it done, they have to load it into dump trucks and take it out onto the ice of Lake Michigan and dump it.

Then there's the fact that a large swathe not only got snow, they got an ice storm to go with it — half-inch to inch build-up of ice over everything. You can't plow ice. You can salt it, but that doesn't make it go away magically, it just makes it go away a little faster. You can sand it, but the sand gets thrown around by the tires of vehicles fairly quickly. And sand doesn't make it go away, either. It just makes it marginally less slick. And you can't salt or sand the power lines. Combine an extraordinary ice-load with high winds and you get downed power-lines. And by the way, a power-line down in the road means that stretch of roadway can't be plowed till the wires are cleared.

And then there are towns that got snow, but don't usually get any (or usually get only a few inches over an entire winter. They don't have the infrastructure to deal with it at all. They don't have the plows and salt- and sand-trucks.

To put it very briefly: This was not a normal situation.

edited 2nd Feb '11 11:17:02 PM by Madrugada

: But ain't there always a report of "Entire state en panic, more snow than expected came"? each bloody year? Does that not mean the exception is the rule?
And ice? Ice is beated by proper tires combined with sand or similar substance. Sand is good for walking on thou.

No, Del Diablo, there isn't something like this every year. If you listen to the media, sure, there is snow-related panic every month of winter pretty much, but this is extremely out of the ordinary.

For myself, I live in Virginia, which has received possibly the most bizarre side-effect of this massive storm: a sunny day with a high of sixty-seven degrees Fahrenheit. Don't ask me why. Someone has a really strange sense of humor.

Well, from my end of the country, this was really no big deal. We only got the northern tip of the tail end of it however.

It was supposed to snow a lot here (around 20 inches) but we got mostly rain. Everything was frozen yesterday, though.

Places like Norway or Alaska get lots of snow every year. People who live there have learned how to deal with it, they've figured out what strategies work for them, and they have the proper equipment.

In towns that get a major snowstorm (more than 6 inches in 24 hours, say) less than once a year, they are simply not prepared to deal with more than a foot or two of snow in a single storm. They don't have a culture that knows how to survive the kinds of winters colder places get. Many towns have to rent their snow plows from neighboring communities. Probably more than half of the people in the US don't own snow pants, tire chains, skis, or snow shoes. In large parts of the U.S., many people don't even own snow shovels or heavy coats.