Tuesday, January 05, 2010

It's snowing! What to do?

It was trying to snow when I left the house this morning and now snowflakes are drifting down in much greater numbers and it's now white over outside.

Watching the BBC this morning and the video of cars skidding along side roads a statement was made that it was "impossible to grit all the roads". Wrong it is possible, just not practical. I think the problem lies in the rise of the suburb. Rather than houses either being directly on a main road or tucked up an offshoot somewhere, we now have a situation where we have a main offshoot to the main road that branches out into lots of little tributaries with a large cluster of residents.

Couple that with the rise in vehicle use and you have all these residents trying to get out, compacting snow and slipping on ice that hasn't anywhere to drain thanks to the poor drainage, building on flood plains, and increase in paving over natural soak areas.

Driving last night I spied large chunks of shattered ice pushed to the side of the streets. Water filling the potholes, freezing and being shattered as it's driven over - nice.

Oh and I forgot this from before Xmas a gritter early morning in Worcester out and about laying down sand being followed half-an-hour later by a road sweeper sweeping it all up. Now that's what I call communication.

5 comments:

Orphi said...

Gritter + sweeper = epic, epic failure.

Also… where the hell do you live?!

Seriously, we were warned of dire snowstorms all through Christmas, but I haven't seen a single snowflake yet. And now we're told yet more snow is going to be dumped… Where is this hypothetical snow??

FlipC said...

You'd have to laugh if it wasn't so stupid.

Anyway find a map, find Birmingham, find Worcester stop about halfway between the two and go a little to the West of the M5. Hi!

If you've not had it yet I'll guess it might be sweeping in soon. Unless it's dumped it all on us instead.

Orphi said...

Haha. Yeah, it'll probably just dump it all on you. ;-)

Actually, I just went outside to look. (There's no daylight in my office.) Apparently there are tiny, tiny, almost invisible specks of ice falling out of the sky. You can just barely see them individually, although there are quite a few of them. Currently it's having absolutely no effect on the ground though.

FlipC said...

I wouldn't be at all surprised as although it's shifted between light and not quite light it hasn't actually stopped coming down since 8:30 this morning. So it might just well snow itself out by the time it reaches you.

FlipC said...

Just to prove me wrong it's just stopped. Now to watch it melt and freeze tonight.