Is history about to repeat itself?
Is history about to repeat itself?
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.
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
> GTA levels of destruction
> No one in the photo is carrying a rocket launcher or chainsaw
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.
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.
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.
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.