(no subject)

[lady_t_220]

So, this is my street right now. You can see the postbox across the road there. That's what I took my highly exciting walk to yesterday.



As you can tell, the snow itself isn't that deep here- it was about 6" yesterday but there's still tufts of grass visible under some of the trees cause we had some glorious sunshine up until about an hour ago when it started snowing again. But the road is currently sitting on nearly five days of compacted ice. If you chip through it it's about a solid inch at the moment. It's not even orange any more cause the vague sprinkling of grit it was given on Wednesday has been covered over. You can sort of see that there are shadow drifts of grit now entombed like mammoths in a glacier.
See the Audi coming towards us? Not even five seconds after I took this pic, it slid across the junction and directly into another car coming across from the left, which in turn slid sideways onto the wrong side of the road and almost got pasted by a bus coming the opposite direction.

*facepalm*

So yeah. The snow is not even remotely dramatic, yet it's so amazingly capable of disrupting EVERYTHING because the council are so utterly shit at dealing with it. Would it have killed them to grit more than once this week? Really? On a main bus route?

Seemingly so.

Comments

[deke.livejournal.com]

Why didn't you get a picture of the crash up? :P

I have to say though, having seen that intersection in greener times, that is a fairly impressive amount of snow for 'round those parts. I'll stop giving you (as much) grief about it.

Also, I think councils are gonna have to suck it up and realize they're going to need to stock up on salt and sand for next year, because it'll probably be just as bad.

[lady-t-220.livejournal.com]

I so would have got a pic, but the people in the car kind of noticed me leaning out the window with my camera so I thought it best to leave them to their slanging match and insurance-detail-swapping. :p

The snow was deeper this morning, I was just too lazy to charge the camera before now.

And yeah, the grit. Councils stockpile enough for 6 days, which has previously been more than enough. These last two years though have had 'unusual' volumes of snow. if it does it again next year they'll re-evaluate and stockpile more, which is when you can guarentee we'll have balmy warm winters again.

One of the councillors was on the local news the other day, and when asked about it pretty much said it was all OUR fault they didn't have more grit. Because aparrently when you ask people what they want the highway budget spent on they say things like 'fixing potholes' and resurfacing, no one mentions GRIT. And if people had said grit, we would have had more grit, but we didn't, so there.

I'm paraphrasing, but that was more or less the gist of it.
*headdesk*

[deke.livejournal.com]

LOL! Ah, local politicians. XD

[angelsnow.livejournal.com]

At least you got grit! Since the snow started three weeks ago, I've seen the grand total of one gritter in Ashton, and that was on Thursday evening!!!

[lady-t-220.livejournal.com]

We've had one gritter here. It was Wednesday lunchtime, and that's all we've had. The main road is OK, but the residential streets are a nightmare.

[gourami-tea.livejournal.com]

Your road looks kinda like what our pavements are like. They've gritted the road but the pavement is just... buh. Grampa already fell over once and banged his head, ive only been out on it once and didnt fall over but i was walking so bloody carefully it took me like 45mins just to run to the post office >_<

[lady-t-220.livejournal.com]

Eeesh. And ow, your poor grandpa. :/
Our pavement's not too bad, most people are avoiding walking so it's not too trampled so if you do have to go out it's just about navigable.

Tuesday swimming BTW, will be contingent on whether I can get to your house without being killed by ice.

[gourami-tea.livejournal.com]

Grampa's ok, he just had a headache for a while ^__^;;

Figured it would... hope it starts melting by then!

[lady-t-220.livejournal.com]

Glad he's not too badly dented by the experience.

[mmmusings.livejournal.com]

Oh dear... that road does NOT look like fun at ALL. That was us in 2008. Nothing but sand and hilarity ensued. The mayor of Seattle lost the election in 2009, mostly because of the response to the snow.

Stay safe!

[lady-t-220.livejournal.com]

Barrels of fu for all the family!

Unfortunately if we lost politicians due to mis-manageent of snow, currently we'd have no one left running the country :p

[viewoftheworld.livejournal.com]

Ya know after living in a place that knows how to deal with snow and lots of it... it is amazing how places that don't ever deal with it approach it. Grit once a week. Here main roads get it multiple times a day - neighborhood daily at intersections and every other day the lengths every other day. IF it snows more then grit goes down after each clearing of the road.

My favorite stupid snow management moment was when we moved back South after living in upstate New York they got snow and had to plow the parking lots of the stores instead of pushing the snow to the back of the lots they shoved up toward the stores so you HAD to climb over it to get in the store and the store employees had to shovel it to clear the entrances... **doh**

[lady-t-220.livejournal.com]

I think the biggest problem, besides the general lack of grit, is that they didn't clear any of the ice before gritting over it on Wednesday. They just sprinkled it on top and the salt melted the sand a bit into the surface then froze over again the next time it snowed.

[viewoftheworld.livejournal.com]

Well yeah gotta plow/scrape the stuff out of the way the salt and grit doesn't make it vanish it's not anti-snow fairy powder.

[lady-t-220.livejournal.com]

So you would think, but noooooo...

In fairness the main roads are ok, but given that the busses all come up here you'd think they'd have extended to major residential routes as well.

[viewoftheworld.livejournal.com]

Yeah or at least the interstions to stop the sliding when people yield, turn and/or stop.

[simonthecat.livejournal.com]

Personally, I'd say it was the Audi driver's fault. My best guess is he was going too fast, saw the car coming from the side and, in what passes for thought in an Audi driver, decided to stop. And being an Audi driver he did the only thing his microbe sized brain could think of and hit the brakes!

What?

No, I don't have anything personal against Audi drivers, it's just that mostly Audis are driven by people who failed at being a BMW driver!

What you should have done was filmed the entire thing and then gone out and offered them a copy of the .mov file each for their respective insurance companies!

Gritters? What gritters? Oh, they do the main roads, sure. Those are nice and clear. Minor roads mostly have a 2" layer of brown slush on them where they've been gritted once or twice. Side roads like I live on have a 3" layer of compacted ice, have not seen a gritter nor will see a gritter.

Interestingly, my route to work is a "white route" apart from where I cross the M4 at J11. Much of it is clearing itself from heavy vehicles breaking the ice up. But fixing all the potholes might be a good idea at some point...!

[lady-t-220.livejournal.com]

In this case, I'd say the blame was pretty even. The Audi wasn't going that fast but the junction's on a very slight incline. They did stop at the juncion and then just slid merrily over the now-invisible white line, while the oncoming car was driving probably a bit close to the kerb. If he'd noticed them sooner and headed a little closer to the centre of the road they'd have just missed each other.

[simonthecat.livejournal.com]

Yes, but... he's an Audi driver... It has to be his fault!

[lady-t-220.livejournal.com]

You tell that to Gene Hunt. Fire up the Quattro!



(I believe it was a 'her' actually...)

[simonthecat.livejournal.com]

Oooohhhhhhhhhh.............................