Thursday, January 07, 2010

Super snow time

(Don't worry, I don' think this will be a "snow blog" much longer.)
I used to make fun of countries who couldn't handle a little snow, when Norway and Sweden and such handle it in their stride every year. But I'm realizing it takes a lot of preparation, both mentally and with equipment. It's not economically feasible to have a lot of equipment standing in readiness for a real winter which only happens once in a blue moon.

I've not gotten any post at all in the last few days, much less some parcels I know I'm due.
And right now my supermarket delivery man told me that I'm lucky, if I'd scheduled my delivery yesterday or the day before, I'd not have gotten it, the trucks just couldn't get around.

Below are some stories/comments from my friends:

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Bob:
Good Grief E.. THAT'S not a snowfall..that's a sprinkling.. [this refers to the lighter snow fall around xmas.] I have that much left in my driveway AFTER it has been plowed..and here most of us don't even bother to clear it away until there's a more than 4 inches fallen..gives the snow tires something to grip on if the fall included the delight of freezing rain to begin with..there's a layer of ice underneath!

Now you can understand why Canadians glower at all the idiots singing about 'White Christmas' and 'Let it snow..let it snow' who mainly live in California of course and mutter things like 'Let's see the twits come dig us out of THIS lot!' LOL!

I've attached pics..not very good ones, of what REAL snowfall looks like..the fence around the garden is 4 feet high and is just showing..and the car is what is called a mid sized saloon here..to give you some idea of it's size..and that was taken after I dug it out enough to find it!

It took the farmer neighbour with a snow blower attachment on hisTractor to unplug my drive, and it took him almost an hour to do it!

And that was just ONE of our 'normal dumpings' that particular winter..2008..the total amount by winter's end had reached the record 444 cms..about 14 feet overall!

After removing the snow from my roof..to avoid having the weight collapse it..I was not able to see out of the windows of the bungalow I live in for most of the winter....LOL!

Bob..who doesn't live in the heavy snowfall area that the Atlantic coast people do...

> They have *more* snow than that!??

YUP! they laugh at the centimeter forecasts..meters is more like it!

If you see pictures of houses with balconies at the bedroom level, it usually indicates that's the way in in winter..the first floor is buried...

VW used to do a commercial about "How does the snow plow driver get to work?' and show the VW bug making it's way through...

Out East and some places out West..they take the plow home with them...or use a front end loader to dig a path through..one big enough to hold a VW along with the snow !

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Mike:
I know what you mean about snow. Once when I lived in New Hampshire, it was just starting to snow when I went to bed sometime after midnight. When I awoke late Saturday morning, the area had gotten a full 24 inches of snow--and not only the roads, but also the *sidewalks*, were already cleared.

By contrast, one time in Washington, D.C., which is essentially a Southern town where it hardly ever snows, they got 10 inches of snow, and it closed down the whole area for three days. I had an interesting time tramping through the deserted downtown taking pictures.

At one time, we lived in an housing development that was only accessible by two roads through a deep ravine. (On two other sides it was closed off by a public park and a reservoir.) One of the roads went in more or less parallel to the ravine, so it wasn't too steep, but another went basically straight down and straight up, so both sides were extremely steep--my brother and I were just the other day talking about how hard those hills were to get up on a bicycle. In snow and ice, we would park our cars at the bottom of the hill and walk up into our development, so we could get out again when the time came. Sometimes it was simply impossible to drive up the hill.

So, one time, after we'd had three or four inches of snow, I was getting out of my car at the bottom of the hill when I saw a local attempt to drive down the facing slope. The car started to skid at the top, and the driver jammed on the brakes. The car, of course, slid. As it came down the hill it first hit a parked car on one side--BAM!--bounced off, slid a ways, and hit a car on the OTHER side, BAM! And then did it once more, hitting a third car on the same side as the first car. It arrived at the bottom of the hill with a fair amount of speed, crossed the road there, and banged into a tree. The driver was flustered but not hurt. And of course the driver never once let up on the brakes--the tires never moved all the way down the hill.

That area just got 24 inches the other day--I wonder how they are coping with that!


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Benny:
Jeg har på fornemmeren, at vores regeringer og kommunerne kalkulerer lidt med nogle få årlige panikdage, fremfor at have en egentlig plan. Onsdag aften i sidste uge gik hele landet i... hvidt, og al trafik gik i stå. Saltning og grusning plejer at ske i god tid, men her var snerydningen ikke engang begyndt på de store veje, da klokken var 23 og jeg skulle hjem fra arbejde. Da lå der 30 cm sne på ringvejen til Glostup.

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Ray:
It looks like we will habe a green Christmas this year. Only about one in ten around here are white, they say.

Your neighbour's problem is probably the tires. Over here, we have special tires for winter, with extra deep treads, and even provisions for installing steel studs in them. The studded tires however are banned in certain places, because they chew up the road surface after a while.

Even without special tires, though, some cars handle quite well in the snow. Many years ago, (back in the fifties) I had a VW Beetle that was excellent in snow. One day, after a storm, looking for a person's driveway, I couldn't see any, so took a guess, and drove into the yard anyway. Turns out I drove through the ditch, onto the lawn, and then turned around and went back out, in over a foot of snow. The guy next door was out shovelling his own driveway at the time, and after I stopped out on the street, he said, "Wow! I need a car like that." Those Beetles were amazing little cars, but they had terrible heating systems, until they made a special gas heater for them.

Around here, people don't know much about driving in snow either, and every snowstorm, there's lots of accidents. The secret to winter driving is to not do anything too suddenly - gentle turns, and slow down gradually, and pump the brakes instead of just stomping on them. Locking the wheels means "game over".

Right now I'm using tires made in Japan, and designed for the rain. They are very good, because the treads pump the water away and prevent hydroplaning. They also work alright in snow. I have a little 1997 Dodge front wheel drive, and it is quite good in snow. But I don't drive it a lot. I got it new, and it still has only about 40,000 Kms on it. Needless to say, it's in excellent condition, and I'm trying to keep it that way.


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Lou:
Back in 1972 when I was a draftee sent to Goergia USA as a military slave, it snowed in Columbus GA for a very rare white season. Southern Americans are not known for their brilliance and stellar intelligence, and everybody stepped on the gas or barkes hard when they started to slide... with obvious results. Cars all over the sides of the road abandoned by their idiot keepers. Before two hours of the storm, me in my VolksBus and a bunch of tow trucks were the only ones moving, running around town doing favors and emergency runs for two days!

When My friends and I got tired of town we took a drive to nearby Stone Mountain park, where we ran up the side of the mountain on a beautiful straight road just deeper than the bumpers in fresh snow, until so much ice accumulated we had to back out as the wheels would not turn, only go straight...

Was a fun winter for a 21 year old Californian!

5 comments:

Mikko J. Kalavainen said...

"Ray: "Your neighbour's problem is probably the tires. Over here, we have special tires for winter, with extra deep treads, and even provisions for installing steel studs in them. The studded tires however are banned in certain places, because they chew up the road surface after a while."

Bah! In Finland, Norway and Sweden winter tires are legally required between December and February. And they are studded.
And at least in Finland (I presume the same goes for the other Nordic countries?) you have to pass a special "slippery" course and lessons in order to get your driver's license. Which was damned good fun as well as informative about how the car behaves on slippery roads, be they wet or icy.
A road with well packed dry snow is actually rather easy, and surprisingly tractionary (is that a word even?).

emptyspaces said...

I live in Virginia, a mid-Atlantic state that sees little snow each year. We got 27 inches a few days before Christmas. Normally around here the plan is just to do nothing and wait for it to melt, but you can't do that with over two feet on the ground.

So they starting plowing...but most of the plows weren't capable of scraping the road clear like you should, so it almost made things worse by leaving a layer on the road that froze each night.

It took a few days for the plows to reach the cul-de-sac where my houe sits - and it wasn't a snowplow that came, but a bucket loader from a construction site that had been pressed into service. I must say, the driver of that behemoth was a true artist.

I grew up in the northeast, and up there they are better prepared. When a big storm (a "noreaster") is imminent, the parking bans start. Temporary signs go up, and most people clear out their cars (the ones who don't get towed). That gives the plows room to properly clear the road. After plowing, they drop lots of sand and salt to keep the road from turning into a skating rink.

All that salt is why people include modifiers like "Arizona car" in their used-vehicle listings...the underside of any 5-10 year-old vehicle in the northeast is corroded.

denis jarry said...

In Canada it's so far only Quebec that has a law you must have snow tires. In those Nordic countries people must like having a good chunk of their taxes go to repairing roads, though, as studs really do chew them up.

In the rest of the country most people only have "all season" which are not very good but seem to get the job done, but this is in southern Ontario. In more northern provinces and norther U.S. states like Minnesota and North Dakota it might be different as well.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Maybe regular frost chews up the roads anyway.

(captcha: bionsub. hmm.)

LÆD said...

"Snow is like sex - you never know how long it will last, or how many inches you'll get."

-unknown