So last night we had a huge whoomph, and this big pile of snow landed on Portsmouth (and many other areas of Southern England) last night. With something like 7cm of snow in Portsmouth this is probably the hardest hit Portsmouth has been since before I started living here. In fact I don’t recall many times the snow being this heavy anywhere (except in the US).
Of course other areas were even harder hit with up to 30cm is snow in places around the South. This has caused traffic chaos with people trapped in cars for up to 12 hours not too many miles from here, and at work this morning most drivers did not arrive. As the snow was continuing to fall heavily, work rather quickly decided to shut for the day and send us all home. Some of us continued to work from home 😐
Some of the thoughts that occurred as various reactions to the adverse weather set in …
Northerners keep criticising Southerners for being wimps when it comes to weather. Well this time the reaction was particularly irritating. The previous day the North also caught some heavy snow, but considerably less that the South got (yes some places in the North got more – places that get snow almost every day in the winter). Did Southerners start criticising when the North ground to a halt ? No we didn’t. It’s about time that Northerners stopped talking about soft Southerners when the weather we got yesterday and today was severe enough to cause the North to grind to a halt.
Businesses of course were whinging about all the money they will lose because of the bad weather – the lost production because of workers being unable to turn up, shoppers not diving in to spend money, etc. Well grow up, and live with it. Nature can’t be beaten, and there are more important things than making money – staying safe and avoiding fatal accidents in bad weather for one.
People are complaining about the council gritting operations being unable to keep the roads open and safe. They obviously don’t understand exactly how the “grit” works. In fact the grit is in fact rock salt and the salt helps to melt a limited amount of ice or snow. That is why gritters repeatedly grit roads when things get bad. What with abandoned cars getting in the way of gritters and the need to repeatedly grit roads, the number of roads that get effectively gritted goes down. Gritting cannot keep roads open in these kind of conditions.
I would say that drivers need to be a little more careful and a little more considerate of other road users, except that it is really the idiot car drivers who need to do that. It is just that the idiots are more prominent in these kinds of conditions. Some advice :-
- If you don’t know how to drive in snow, don’t try.
- Drive slowly … there is too great a chance of you sliding uncontrollably. I don’t care if you bend your nice shiny car, but I don’t particularly want to be smeared across the pavement at the end of your skid.
- When clearing the snow off your windscreen, do the same for the rest of the car. All that snow will often leap off the car as you are moving along and the dropped snow will make things tricky for anyone else around. That is if it doesn’t hit anyone!
Lastly, whilst I have every sympathy for anyone who slips and falls in the present conditions there are some who wear entirely inappropriate footwear for the conditions. Wearing flat bottomed shoes with no grip and then complaining about how slippery things are just isn’t right.