No, this year’s storm hit on a weekend, and didn’t really get going in Raleigh until nighttime. Most people stayed home. That year’s storm arrived pretty much as forecast but a lot of people ignored the forecast because a storm forecast a couple weeks earlier had fizzled out. It was around lunchtime on a weekday and everyone thought they could still stay at work and drive home and it wouldn’t be a big deal. Then the snow came quick and heavy and everyone panicked and tried to go home at the same time, unleashing rush hour traffic on bad road conditions with traffic jams blocking the plows from treating the roads.
I love that you provided an actual and substantive answer, thank you!
The one thing they left out was school buses. Schools did let out early, but too late, so the traffic from the buses and parents melted the first layer of snow, with no plowing or salting. So it refroze into sheets of ice before people left work.
Source: Me in traffic for 12 hours.
Note: I now live in a place so cold that this week I hiked in -6F and had ice cream outside at 13F. 😃
ice cream outside at 13F
Why do people do this? It doesn’t look enjoyable.
When it’s cold all the time you adapt (not your body, your behaviors). For instance, when I am outside, I’m moving and working my body, and generally within 10-15 minutes I’m stripping off a layer or two already. People don’t typically stand around in this cold unless they have to.
Even with the ice cream, it was after a ridge hike, and we stood outside for about 15 minutes. After that amount of time your core temp lowers and you start to feel the cold, so you either get moving or get inside. But when I arrived I would have been happy in a T-shirt.
> GTA levels of destruction
> No one in the photo is carrying a rocket launcher or chainsaw
And no dead prostitutes from what I see
This is the highway sitting right between Raleigh and Durham, seems pretty clear this go around. Not many folks out on the road, but it was like 10pm
Greater Toronto Area levels of destruction. Still fits, actually.
No army.
My guy is definitely on the phone with Lester tryna clear shit up
Well if they tried to buy snow tires they would be expired before the next measurable snowfall
That and municipalities that don’t deal with the shit regularly don’t have annual budgetary expenses carved out to prepare to keep the roads manageable for the once or twice a decade event. I’ve always lived in places where heavy fall and freezing temperatures are expected and yeah, everything is structured around that reality and everyone has more experience with it. I don’t judge a fish for its inability to fly, I’ve always kind of rolled my eyes at people that try to act high and mighty because them and their local municipalities are better prepared to deal with recurrent weather patterns than folks that only have to deal with it in rare circumstances.
I will judge people who go drive in the snow and don’t even take a few minutes to do donuts in a parking lot to figure how the car behaves.
Being a Northerner in the South, I just shake my head at some of the bizarre things people do with their vehicles. Riding around getting high with your friends in your car, smashing your front bumper through snow plow piles crossing streets? Bet you enjoy the $8k in damage to the electronics in that thing when you realize the plastic bumper and radar are destroyed and falling off. Taking a gravel shovel to your car’s hood to dig it out? Yeah there’s still a car under there, you’ll remember when you see the paint damage. Put a tarp over your car? Good luck getting it off when it’s encased in a 200lb ice shell. Even the folks who stick their wipers straight up… what you think that’s gonna do exactly? Not save you any time, that’s for sure, now you gotta carve the ice around them carefully instead of just scraping across it in one movement, and the wipers will be too warped to be useful until they warm up, which you can’t do because they aren’t touching the windshield.
Just leaving the car be and then starting it for a bit before pushing the ice off is fine… hell I’ve deiced my car with a piece of cardboard and a credit card plenty of times.
Not to mention for the wipers up bit, it’ll stretch out the spring that provides the tension needed to hold it to the window, so even after the wipers thaw, they’ll still work for shit, but now they’ll work for shit forever!
Late last week I advised my younger coworkers that if we got freezing rain as predicted they needed to just stay home and that they would likely be stuck there for a couple of days. No one here knows how to drive on ice but think their lifted 4x4 truck with bald all weather tires will give them the edge they need. The cities, parishes, and state don’t have the resources to deal with it either.
One of them (from Alaska) decided to take a 2.5 hour trip to buy a jetski after work on Friday. They’re almost home after leaving Saturday morning to get home.
It’s half cause people aren’t used to it, and half cause there’s no infrastructure to keep the roads clear.
We just got 2.5 feet here in Boston, and I was able to buy beer by 3pm
Isn’t cold weather infrastructure wonderful!
here’s Florida, had to wear a coat today.
deleted by creator
