Oolite Bulletins

My country Denmark is shutting down, slowly, we have salt left for 1 day in our county then the autobahn/freeway/highway is not getting salt either..

It is already slippery and it is about the get slipperier... and the weather folks say the situation is going to stay like this for the next 2 months..

My Local lake is about 23 kms long if I walk along the edges.. so its not a little lake.. its frozen to about a deapth of 23 cms.. So it is safe to drive cars on it now, which is quite fun, if you dare to risk it.. I do not.. .

and with all this salt, it is going to be a yellow spring, at least along the roads,..

I know of 2 people who are "snowed in", as in they cannot get up some dirt road with their cars.

I was in the north of Germany last Saturday, and it is even more grim there, since they stopped using salt on anything but their autobahns, so its driving on ice there now. and my local roads are being turned into ice slowly but surely..

So that was east-Jutland of Denmark

how is your regions weather behaving...

Ow man, that blows!

Here in Houston, the weather has been relatively mild. Which is a good thing, because the people here simply cannot drive on ice! They can barely handle rain, much less a dry road.

Keep it safe!

Crickey, sounds like the situation here in the UK last month wasn't half as bad as it is there now. Our media usually gives the impression that as a nation we're woefully under prepared for winter unlike all our sensible european neighbours. Seems thats not actually the case after all.
I have Danish family and own some shares in the family holiday home near Ry in Jutland, I imagine the lake there must be frozen too which I don't think has happened for a long long time.

We've been getting some snow too, and more is in the pipeline.
Ah -um -yes, here in eastern Finland.

Salt on the road is bad for cars, at least older ones which aren't so well protected agains rusting. And salt's only effective in relatively high temperatures, thus it's used here only on main routes and in some cities. Most of the time those roads are filled with slush and that's mightily annoying.

If you have decent winter tyres, snow isn't really bad. Of course you can't drive like in summer, but it isn't constant slippin' n' slidin' either. Oh yeah, witer tyres are mandatory here from December 1st to the end of February. These come in two flavours - the traditional spiked tyres (those spikes are actually small metal knobs almost completely recessed into the tyre compund nowadays) and newer spikedless ones with special compound (so called friction tyres).

In the snow straight after Christmas I got snowed in for two days - live on a very steep hill and the council took away all the grit bins in the summer and didn't put them back even though they knew it was going to snow.

I dug the car out twice - 70 yds to the main road (which wasn't gritted either but was more passable) but each time it snowed over night we were trapped again.

I've got snow chains - but of course as soon as you get to a treated road where you're down to tarmac you have to take them off or risk breaking them - tempted to invest in these snow socks although they're very expensive.

This current batch of snow hasn't reached the south of England (yet)...

Although Frame's tale shatters the UK illusion that the rest of Europe can/is coping with the snow and has more salt than a crisp factory.

Scandinavia copes quite well it seems. Places that get stacks of snow every year are best prepared, simply by making people have different tyres for winter than summer. Places like Germany cope better, but even their resources get severely strained in prolonged snowy weather.

I always had the impression that the reason the UK ground to a halt in the snow was its relative rarity. It's just not cost effective to keep ploughs and large salt stocks around for such an infrequent event.
I confess I'm slightly surprised that Denmark and Finland have similar problems; although what we call heavy snow and what northern Europe calls heavy snow aren't necessarily the same thing of course.

I live in Oklahoma, which is NOT famous for it's snow. What I have found since living here vs. living in Wisconsin (as a kid) is that in Oklahoma, we don't get snow. Most often, we get freezing rain which is an ENTIRELY different animal.

Last week, we got a good coating of ice followed on by 7 inches of snow. When your roads get a 1" ice layer then 7 inches of snow, it tends to make for MUCH different driving conditions than snow alone.

Cool pictures!

Loxley wrote:

I confess I'm slightly surprised that Denmark and Finland have similar problems;

Nah, only the south and south-western parts of Finland have problems with snow. Usually not much snow and when it starts to snow, it comes with abundancy - mix ridiculous amounts of salt there and lots of people who are not accustomed to driving in slippery / poor visibility conditions - problems abound...

Rest of the country copes well. If a snow storm happens to pass over, some may be trapped for a while before ploghs come to rescue, but it's usually a matter of hours, not days.

In San Francisco Bay Area, we had lots and lots of rain...
(pause for laughter to die down)

Really it came down quite hard and the wind was very strong. There was flooding on several streets.
I walk to work. It takes about 15 minutes. My umbrella was almost pulled out of my hand a couple times, and by the time I got to work my pants (trousers) were soaked from just thigh level down and socks were soaked as well. Had to sit a t a desk that way until lunchtime when it let up a bit and I could walk home and change.

Today a little much desired rain broke a week-long heat wave here. We had temperatures of over 30 degrees C daily, for now it is back to middle twenties, I think. Although it usually gets quite hot in the afternoon after a morning rain.

Anyway, my brain is not in the imminent danger of melting right now, which is a good thing, I guess.

Well, it snowed in Glasgow last night. Must have been, ooh, half an inch? It's all gone now though. But we ran out of grit a long time ago – we've been using the crispy bits from the bottom of deep-fat chip fryers for some time now.

Disembodied wrote:

But we ran out of grit a long time ago – we've been using the crispy bits from the bottom of deep-fat chip fryers for some time now.

That's going to smell..., errmmm..., interestingly, when spring comes.

Nah, the pigeons will have eaten it all by then. The commonest cause of death for pigeons in Glasgow is cholesterol poisoning ...