Thursday, December 23, 2004

Snow in Memphis

Contrary to popular belief and the almost contagious joy of one office mate. Snow in Memphis during Christmas is not a good thing.

Actually snow or ice anywhere it only snows or ices once every two or three years is a bad thing. Of course my opinion of the weather is biased since i will be traveling home Thursday night.

Which normally i would not be concerned because it would not be a snowballs chance in hell that any of this would stick, but we have had a few days of below freezing temps, and after it snows it is supposed to stay very cold also. Which is a potent mix in the Memphis where people do not know how to drive anyways under regular conditions.

cube

update: They let us go from work at around 3:30, the ice was still slushy on the roads, but you could not drive fast. By the time i got home, there was an least an inch of semi-solid ice on the ground that did not look like it was melting. It took me a long time to get home from work, and when i got home, i promptly left and returned 2 and rented 4 movies from blockbuster.

I have movies, video games, and food. What more does a man need.

update 2: Memphis does have salt trucks and sand trucks, but a limited supply. I have heard this second hand, and have never seen one before, so i cannot confirm that statement.

4 comments:

Andrew said...

It's not just the drivers, it's the municipalities. I grew up near Buffalo, where there were fleets and fleets of plow trucks with sand and salt moving out as soon as there was word of a big storm. We'd get a few feet of snow, but most roads would be comfortably drivable within hours after visibility cleared up.

But even when I lived around NYC and in Jersey, where snow can at least be expected every year, nobody knew what the hell to do with it. The roads were terrible and slippery for days after the storms. Lots of them took days to get plowed by the town, so you'd see little pick-ups trying to move it out of the way. It was ridiculous.

I can only imagine what its like down there if you get any accumulation.

Man of Issachar said...

I think you may know this, but i wanted to point out to others.

I have lived in the south my entire life, we do not have salt trucks (is that the proper name), and do not have snow plows.

The only way the snow ...errr...ice (which we really do not get snow in the south it is more ice) gets off the roads if the the ground is not cool enough (the ice does not stick) or if the temp gets above freezing.

Normally, ice will still be on the trees and the ground long after it is gone from the roads, but this year it looks like it will not even get above freezing tommorw.

And we had a few days of it being really cold, so it cooled off the groud.

In other words, if it does not warm up tommow i can watch the four movies i rented tonight.

Dave Justus said...

I mock you all. Here we usually get a good amount of snow (not this year yet though) and we expect our drivers to cope. Yeah, we have plows and sand-trucks, but they never get sent out until the snow has mostly melted again anyway.

Gib said...

Yeah, here in Atlanta, there's like one truck for a metropolitan area of 4,000,000 people. We don't get winter weather often, but anything even remotely wintery shuts the whole city down.

It's great. Merry Christmas.