Here is the Arch at the University of Georgia in Athens. 
Posted on 01/29/2014 5:02:55 AM PST by Biggirl
ATLANTA (AP) -- Students camped out with teachers in school gyms or on buses and commuters abandoned cars along the highway to seek shelter in churches, fire stations - even grocery stores - after a rare snowstorm left thousands of unaccustomed Southerners frozen in their tracks.
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New Jersey. Parts of it quite close to Manhattan, where entire Upper Eastside neighborhoods were recently crippled by mere snow. Thank goodness they didn't have to deal with black ice, like Atlanta.
I’m not trying to be harsh actually.
Municipal Snow/ice removal up north becomes ‘expected’ and done without your having to actually take part in it or worry about if it will happen. It’s like garbage collection or waste water removal. It ‘just happens’. You expect it to happen. You don’t realize how important it is to keep things moving along.
Then you move to the deep south. 2” of snow is forecast and your work cancels and your kids schools shut down. You express ridicule and amazement. Not realizing that the snow and ice removal you came to take for granted in NJ and CT just doesn’t exist down here. At all. And the snow will be gone in a day anyways. It’s cheaper for the municipalities to take the snow day, once every 2 or 3 years, than it is to buy big expensive trucks and clearing equipment and maintain salt depots.
I will say this is the second snow my parents, who live 45m SOUTH of me, have had this year. The second in 2 weeks time. My father, nearly 80, says that’s a first in his memory as well. This is the first time I remember snow being around the next day since the 70’s. And it might not melt today either with the temp on my back porch standing at 18F still and cloudy outside.
Usually our snow is in the overnight or early morning, everyone gets a half day and by lunch time the temps are in the low 40’s and even if the snow isn’t all gone, the roads are safe and everyone goes to work 1/2 day. We’re way further south than Atl. Our high temp yesterday was 29F at 12:01AM. Temps fell all day long and it was snowing with a temp of 23F at my house. Neither my father nor his 75yr old brother can remember it snowing with temps that cold. Snow is usually a 29F+ event.
Oh, and no one has snow tires. Although there may be a briskish business in chains for emergency vehicles after this.
There’s no scraping of ice. Our last storm, it got packed down. We just drive very slow over it and pump, pump, pump, no slamming on breaks.
We never get black ice? I didn’t know that.
It’s easy to do when someone has sanded/salted the roads though.
I’ve driven both places. In the snow and ice. I drove in NJ just a few days after the 33” snow storm of ‘96. If we got 3’ of snow down here it would literally cripple us. It would be like those NYC neighborhoods that DeBlasio didn’t plow at all.
They were plowing the streets up there even as the first 2 or 3” had fallen. And kept it up through the night. Every few hours the sound of the snow plows scraping pavement woke us up. So yes, there’s scraping. Those several hundred pound snow plows do a pretty effective job. And the salt out of the back end of the trucks does the rest.
I drove in NJ snow and ice for the better part of a decade. I only delayed when it was more than 8”. Mainly to give the removal equipment time to do their jobs and for NJ highway patrol and local cops time to get all the wrecks cleared.
Everything you say is spot on.
I would expect after reading it for smart conservatives to understand.
I would expect dumb and smart a$$es not to.
Actually black ice is a big problem up north. Depending on the roadway. The closest I ever came to a major wreck involved black ice in a curve/turn on ramp onto the NJ Turnpike. The rest of the road was ‘perfect’ as it had been salted and plowed the day before. However, the melting snow had made a giant puddle that in the 15F or so overnight had refrozen in spite of being salty. As the reporters say ‘UNEXPECTED!’.
Driving on ice can be done, fairly easily, but it requires something most people in the South usually don’t have.
Experience, and THE RIGHT KIND OF TIRES....
The tires, and their condition, make all the difference, in that type of weather.
I thought I read somewhere that nobody can drive in New Jersey. :)
All my family live in the southern states.....and from Atlanta, Ga. To Tennessee they are frozen in.
To put it in perspective, my uncle said there were 130 plus car accidents in a matter of hours in his small burg of Tennessee
Here is the Arch at the University of Georgia in Athens.
Now that’s funny, LOL!
Having said that, I’m not going to rag on the deep South for its reaction to snow. They rarely get any, so I wouldn’t expect them to have experience in dealing with it.
***4. Turn into the skid***
I tried that a few years ago. All my truck started doing was fishtail all over the road till I hit a ditch. I then engaged the 4WD and got out, went on my way in 4WD.
Then there are those Dallas TX drivers!
We ragged on y’all for ‘hurricane preparedness’. So it all works out :P
Yup, wife and daughter are still stranded; she tried to make it home and had to pull off of the road. She spent the night with nearby friends - his truck was rear-ended when he picked them up. Doggie was home alone, she was rescued by another neighbor this a.m.. Hundreds of kids (all the way down to infants) spent the night in schools and daycare, and some with complete strangers. I guess it's a great way to make new friends....
I can’t remember the last time we had a hurricane in Virginia, lol.
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