here’s Florida, had to wear a coat today.
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.
The infrastructure is huge. I drive for Uber during the big ice storm in Texas several years ago around the airports, and every northerner I had in my car commented on how the roads seemed substantially more dangerous than they ever felt in their home states, because of the inadequate plows or salt trucks.
If might be talking out of my ass, but I vaguely remember there being something about road asphalt compositions being different- using more oil in the binder up north, to keep the freeze/ thaw from destroying the road, which also preventings the water from soaking i to it as deeply, making ice accumulate less, (more melted snow runs off the road instead of staying on the surface, and being less slick and adhered into the road.
The payoff being the extra binder makes roads breakdown faster, not to mention having them melt and become malleable under car tires if it gets too hot.
It’s always a bit stupid when people compare weather like this.
They basically go “I live in the high Arctic and frequently enjoy temperatures of -40°C”, so all those people complaining about snow in Hawaii are overreacting.
It’s like they don’t listen to the thing they’re saying.
We just got 2.5 feet here in Boston, and I was able to buy beer by 3pm
Isn’t cold weather infrastructure wonderful!
ted cruz fled as soon as a frost was coming.
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!
That’s the problem in the UK, it only really heavily snows one year in five so it isn’t profitable or economical to really invest in things like snow tires and snow ploughs, so whenever there is significant snow it does kind of cause everything to grind or halt. The alternative is to buy a bunch of snow equipment that needs constant maintenance throughout a winter where it doesn’t get below 3°C, and nothing more exciting than a lot of rain happens.
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.
Forecasts were all over the place, and I actually saw this afternoon radar saying there was heavy snow, a forecast for the time saying it should be raining, and I saw nothing. North Raleigh area got the earlier bit of sleet/ice layer and then maybe an inch of snow, but that’s about it.
The shield held. I haven’t been out to see the road conditions, but they’ll probably be worse the next two nights as we get some melt and then refreeze.
It’s super cool how the Republicans have stopped sharing weather satellite data with weather forecasters and cut the budget for sending up weather balloons. They really govern for the people, ya know?
We had about that much snow today, and there are two things I realized. First, I really need to take better care of my shoes. And second, walking up the hill when it’s slippery is fucking exhausting. Traffic was normal.
Yak Trax are your friend. Don’t tell ICE.
> GTA levels of destruction
> No one in the photo is carrying a rocket launcher or chainsaw
And no dead prostitutes from what I see
Not one jetbike flying around strafing people…
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
deleted by creator
Holy shit, you weren’t kidding.
Hey, I’m the real Fediverse Chick. I don’t scam anyone, I just shitpost.
It isn’t a bloody contest.
No one said it was?
You act like it is. Flooding SEVERAL communities with dozens to hundreds of posts drown out every voice but yours for hours on end. Not to mention the ridiculous rate at which you post makes it worthy of being called spam.
…then block them?
i don’t see the issueOnly one of us seems to think it’s a contest, and it ain’t me. Most people enjoy the content I post. If you don’t like it, you can block me. Pretty easy to do, and you don’t have to be a drama queen about.
Posters like you keep the fediverse & Lemmy alive. I’m not sure why those other 2 are bothered by people being active, they should be encouraging it. Please keep doing what you’re doing, a ton of us appreciate you keeping us entertained.
Go ahead and ignore the rest of what I said. You apparently don’t understand the meaning of a figure of speech, but you were certainly bragging about how much you post in a previous comment. You are spamming posts at a rate that defies human capability. I’m not even going to attempt to count the number of posts you put up in a matter of a few hours but it’s in the hundreds. If anyone else posted in that period of time we’ll never know because you buried them all. And that’s several different communities. It’s absolutely ridiculous.
