How many off you are off work cause of the snow?

[LFCJohnSmith]

We have 1 plow guy that has a whole town of about 115KM² to clear. Which is close to half of your whole population for the same area. Yet we are able to clear that area with 1 person and you cant do it with just about 7 times the amount of people?

Yeah he may work 12-16 hours clearing the area, and the area he started with may need to be redone by the time he finishes, but the fact remains we have 1 guy who clears a very large area. Since it is a "smaller" town according to the state we dont get NYS DOT (New York State Department of Transportation) assistance. So the town has to pay someone separately to do the job. Since there isnt much money to go around, there isnt more than 2 people who do the job.

Maybe we ahve a different mind set, when our Oct storm hit, about ½ of the population near us lost power. We had people crashing at our small apartment that we didnt even know just so they would have heat and food to eat. We pitch in and help each other out if we see someone who slide off the road.

I am not saying you dont. I am just trying to show you what goes on around here. We have a lot of area to cover and we still get it done. With a far less amount of people. I would think with more people it would be easier.

I think the problem is that we have and you don't have which means that you keep moving while we don't, and I know you are saying that you weren't expecting it but if your cars and people are still moving then I think that there is a big difference in the ways that we deal with the snow. In Liverpool people had actually managed to get to work in the morning but about dinner time there was a snow storm and all the roads became ice pads, It isnt snow on the roads it is an actual layer of ice. The council's didn't have enough grit to go around all the roads they could only grit the main roads, soas a result buses were notable to make it up inclines so they were all cancelled. Also the slip roads that lead to the motorways were not treatedso lorrys were jack knifing on them making using the motorways un usable. The councils ordered enough grit to last from the beginging of winter to the end of winter in our normal condidtions, but a cold snap before xmas had put a strain on those supplies so when we got another cold snap after christmas there grit then had to be rassioned even more. None of the roads were treated and as a result none of the cars were able to drive on them, I presume you have the same tyres that we have cause our cars were not able to move on the roads as they were so bad, so I can only presume that your roads had been treated. There can be no other reason why your car could drive through the weather and our cars couldnt, and as has already been said the authorities had told people not to use the cars unless they really had to and employers weren'tgoing to force people to go into work as the icy conditions were so dnagerous.

We don't have the same plan or the same vehicles for gritting and plowing the roads as you do cause the powers that be don't think it is worth the investment as these condidtion are very rare, and as I have already said it is the worse snow fall for 30 years. People would rather the money spent on repairing pot holes in the road. The reason why we have also not got any snow drifts is because we haven't had any wind so the snow hasn't had any chance to drift, so maybe we got worse weather than yourselves.

 

[Kharn]

If he is gaurding artillery batteries then it sounds like he may be in the Royal Artillery, but now you have baffled me again saying he is a captain, I thought he was in his early 20's or something.

Is he in the regular army or the territorial army, which is the equivalent of your national gaurd i.e. part time soldiers, or weekend warriors if you like? We don't live all that far from each other only about 4 - 5 miles and if he is in the TA then he may be in the Rayal Artillery which has a barracks about 2 minutes from my house. There is a TA barracks by where he lives in Liverpool but they are medics, and I don't think they would be gaurding the artillery.

Regular army, and we are not just guarding artillery we have some other duitys besides that but most of them can be summed up by saying "long range combat patrol"

 

[Oreo]

I think it is just different, Mak.

It is much like when i go to Ski resorts. They obviously know how to deal with snow in the village and so it doesn't affect them, simple things like everyone has the right footwear to grip in the snow, nearly all of the cars have tyres that cope better with snow and people are just used to dealing with it.

Pretend that in New York you only got 1 or 2cm of snow for about 2 days a year, you would not at all be used to it. You would drive cautiously, you wouldn't have the right footware, people would be scared to drive and the authorities wouldn't be very well prepared. Then image suddenly one year the snow lasts for a week and over a foot of snow has fallen, i don't think many people would even dare try and travel to work in there little Ford Ka's and Renault Clio's like everyone has around here in the UK.

And Mak, just because we have alot more people for the same area - does not mean we have anymore people capable of clearing snow. Infact in all my life i have never seen a snow plow. They do have the occasional one because sometimes you see them on the news, but they look more like vans with a steel plate bolted on the front

Even though they've only had 2 or 3inches where i live it hasn't got above 0c in the night, so when it reaches 1c during the day the snow melts abit and covers all the roads in sheet ice. And simply put we do not have anywhere near enough grit to go around, i live in a village of 13,000 people in the suburbs of leicester which is a pretty big city and only one road is gritted each night. Just in our village there has been 3 crashes (that i have seen) over the past 2 days of people sliding down there ungritted road onto the gritted road only to crash into oncoming traffic and i only have to walk 1mile to school.

And remember we are not explicitly saying that people are just sitting at home. People are attempting to get into work but much of the time it is just impossible. It only takes one accident and then the roads are closed for hours. My dad even went to work in his Land Rover Discovery 4x4 that is highly modified for off roading. The snow is not a problem he can just plough straight through but what he can't do is navigate down a closed road. He never got to work today he just sat in traffic while it took him 7 hours to get home even though it's a 45minute drive to get to work.

 

[LFCJohnSmith]

Regular army, and we are not just guarding artillery we have some other duitys besides that but most of them can be summed up by saying "long range combat patrol"

Are you in the Duke of Lancaster regiement then Saxon?

How long is you tour for, is it a 6 month one, and how manytimes is this you have now been to Afghanistan and Iraq?

Got to admit though, I had you down aas a spotty teenager who spent a lot of time with computer geeks in the fact center once a month. It is very shocking to learn that not only are you not a 20 year old or a teenager but you are also a captain in the army.

 

[carnageX]

We've been having some crappy weather here as well lately... Had around a foot of snow which wasn't bad early in the week, but the friggin wind is what kills me. Yesterday I don't think it got above zero, plus the wind had its effects. I had looked at the temps a few times, and it was around -10*F all day, with a wind chill of about -35*F. Yeah...cold. I didn't leave the house for 2 days until last night to go out with some friends because I didn't wanna be out in the blowing wind and snow.

 

[KSoD]

Prepare for the worst and hope for the best.

So why is it that just because you only get 2cm of snow a year you dont prepare for something like this?

That is the single biggest factor as to why we can still get to work in the same conditions.

I made it 20 miles in the same conditions shown in a Honda Civic. It can be done. We have 11,000 people in my town. I dont even work in my town and had to drive through 2 other towns to get to work. Yet i still managed.

Went to bed after midnight with it being 50 degrees with rain. Woke up to it being 11 degrees with several feet of snow. (freezing is 32 degrees here) So no we were not prepared. The roads looked exactly like they did in the video Oreo linked to yet i still managed to make it to work, despite the accidents and conditions. So i wont understand the reasons you guys have for what was done. I am not making excuses for anyone or anything.

 

[LFCJohnSmith]

People did make it into work on the Tuesday, but there was a snow storm which then made driving conditions hazardous and cars were going nowhere. It wasn't countrysideit was city center gridlock with cars unable to get up even slight inlcines,the buses were also canclled cause the roads were just a layer of ice.

And like i have alreqady said they do not plan for this type of weather as the money would be a waste because it's such a rare event. The only roads that got salt put down on them were vital trunk roads such as motorways but that left all the slip roads without cover which then caused lorrys to jackknife and block the entrance. There wasnt a couple of cm's of snow there was about 5 inches of snow in about 3 hours, which fell on roads which already had a layer of ice on them, altough the roads weren't that bad that people couldn't drive on them. Like I have said people were not being feable by not going out in their cars they were told to not go out unless they had to. Put it this way the nightime temperature at the moment is only a few degrees celcius warmer than the south pole.

 

[Oreo]

**Prepare for the worst and hope for the best.**

So why is it that just because you only get 2cm of snow a year you dont prepare for something like this?

That is the single biggest factor as to why we can still get to work in the same conditions.

I made it 20 miles in the same conditions shown in a Honda Civic. It can be done. We have 11,000 people in my town. I dont even work in my town and had to drive through 2 other towns to get to work. Yet i still managed.

Went to bed after midnight with it being 50 degrees with rain. Woke up to it being 11 degrees with several feet of snow. (freezing is 32 degrees here) So no we were not prepared. The roads looked exactly like they did in the video Oreo linked to yet i still managed to make it to work, despite the accidents and conditions. So i wont understand the reasons you guys have for what was done. I am not making excuses for anyone or anything.

** i quite agree, but our government beleives that exact opposite. Prepare for nothing, because supposedly it never effects us.

But Mak, i find it hard to beleive the weather people didn't predict any snow. There is being wrong, and then there is that. Not accounting for 40f drop in temperature and 2foot of snow in a timescale of just overnight is nearly unfathomable with the power of todays weather supercomputers. How can you say you were unprepared ? Surely it was on the news, weather, online etc

And like we say, yes a 20mile trip can be done we quite agree. But not if the roads are blocked by crashed cars or totally closed, like they were/are. That is when it's impossible.

I guess you can only understand if you were in SE England right now or Scotland.

On a government level and authorities, alot more could've been done and better prepared. But on a personal person to person level, there is nothing we can do. It all lies in there hands.

This video near the end shows how bad the conditions were in SE England better than the other video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJKtfvYmsk0 I have to say i am totally jealous of them 2 lads.

 

[Tim]

Simple reason: Cost.

Its not deemed worth spending huge amounts of money protecting against something that so rarely happens

With you Mak, as you said, this is normal. Because its so regular you automatically do things that we don't. The cost of making our country snow proof would be huuuuuge

 

[Oreo]

Simple reason: Cost.

Its not deemed worth spending huge amounts of money protecting against something that so rarely happens

With you Mak, as you said, this is normal. Because its so regular you automatically do things that we don't. The cost of making our country snow proof would be huuuuuge

That is one argument.

But the cost of the country grounding to a halt everytime it snows is almost undoubtedly bigger.