Um…yeah. I keep an apartment there.
During true blizzards and huge snow storms, a lot of the snow is pushed up into huge piles on the streets - where it sits for months sometimes. I still have a memory of a major storm in the late 70s, where there were huge, absolutely huge, piles of snow pushed into the gutters of 5th Avenue. Mind-boggling to look at.
I was in Queens from 75 to 77. I missed any big snow. I was very happy with that. :-)
You must be talking about the Blizzard of 1978.
You must be talking about the Blizzard of 1978.
You must be talking about the Blizzard of 1978.
Yes that is the problem in the major east coast cities; no place to plow or shovel the snow to unless it is picked up and hauled away and that takes time; too many streets and many of them narrow and one way with cars parked on either side that end up getting plowed in, street to curb to sidewalks that butt right up against the buildings, no yards or grassy areas in many places.
Add to that the traffic congestion along the heavily populated NE corridor which is not as much of a problem in less congested places like upstate NY or the Upper Peninsula or out West in the ski resort areas. When you get traffic grid lock, the snow plow/salt trucks are also grid locked and rendered useless.
And it’s just not the I-95 corridor in the “big cities”; that happened here in central PA two weeks ago. We got a clipper system that only gave us only about 3” but the worst of it hit right during the morning rush hour and it was very cold, too cold for the brine and salt that had been put down earlier to be any good. My normal 45 to 50 minute commute from York to north of Lancaster took me 3+ hours. I was stuck on Rt. 30 for a time at a complete standstill and it took about an hour to go about a mile at one point. The roads became very icy and I saw many cars and trucks off in ditches. I also saw several PennDOT trucks (and FYI PennDOT sucks when it comes to handling snow storms IMO) just sitting in traffic on west bound 30. But in their defense, they can’t plow or salt if they are stuck in traffic. And to make matters worse, many of the local school districts didn’t have a delayed start so there were also school busses and parents trying to get their kids to school on time.
My nephew experienced a similar commuting nightmare that same day down in MD, his normal 1 1/4 hour commute from Hanover PA to Owings Mills MD took him over 4 hours. He told me the back roads were very slick and slow going but since he has AWD and there wasn’t much traffic, he did OK. But once he got to the Baltimore metro area it was complete grid lock.
I probably would have been better off taking my normal back roads route to work but there are several steep hills and winding sections and I had tried that during a similar snow last year and ended up turning around and going back home because of all the accidents, cars getting stuck trying to go up the hills and the local police closing sections of many of the roads I normally take.
The other thing many folks who don’t live in the Mid Atlantic and NE don’t understand is that a Nor’Easter is sort of like a hurricane with but with snow and wind instead of rain and wind.
Nor’Easters much like hurricanes are unpredictable. They can sometimes peter out or move father off the coast with little impact or they can very suddenly intensify and hug the coast and dump a lot of snow over a very short period of time and tend to develop localized bands of extremely heavy snow. People living along the coast are
Sometimes the snow starts out dry and fluffy but as typical with a Nor’Easter, as the warmer Atlantic air wraps in as the coastal low intensifies, the snow becomes very heavy in intensity and as in very heavy as in wet. There is also often a lot of wind with Nor’Easters as they ramp up; that combined with the heavy wet snow brings down power lines. And then there is “thunder snow” which is a pretty neat phenomena to watch but is an indication of very rapid intensification and that you are probably under one of those heavy bands – think of how a summer thunderstorm can dump a lot of rain in a very short time – now picture that heavy rain as snow. I understand that lake effect snows in areas like Buffalo also do this heavy banding thing, but again, Buffalo is not NYC or Boston or Philly or Baltimore or DC as far as population density and road grid lock.
Fortunately if I know bad weather is coming I can take my laptop home with me and work from home. And that’s what I’m planning on doing tomorrow. We here in my area of PA are only forecast to get 5-8” but I know how these storms can sometimes blow up. I would much rather stay home and work in my PJ’s with a cup of coffee or hot coco than spend 3+ hours of unproductive time stuck in traffic or worse yet, get stuck at work and not able to get back home or have a 3+ hour commute home or worse get into an accident because of some idiot driver; the idiot drive who doesn’t know how to drive in the conditions and slams on their breaks when the feel themselves sliding, or the A-hole driving a 4 wheel SUV or pickup truck who thinks having 4W or AWD makes them invincible and that the laws of physics do not apply to them.