Huckleberry said:
Here's some video of that snowstorm. I don't remember this sort of thing happening in New England, where the plows are running before the snow stops falling, and the roads are salted thoroughly.
Wow, I just got a chance to watch that video. It's like pinball with cars! Was there a steep hill there that you can't see with the angle of the video? Even once the cars turned sideways, they skidded a LONG time. Though, I don't know why you'd head down that road looking at the carnage below. People around here drive me crazy with stupid moves in snow too. As I've mentioned a million times, we have very steep, curving mountain roads. When it snows, there's a good chance that no matter how slow you go, you might skid on the way down, and there's a good chance you can't go fast enough to get all the way to the top going up the hills. So, the best thing to do is just let one car at a time head up or down a hill and everyone else just wait until they're clear before the next one goes...that way if they slide or turn sideways or get stuck, you 1) don't skid into them and 2) don't get stuck with them. It never fails that there's someone tailgating up and down hills. What are they thinking?! I've seen plenty of cars start up the hill in front of my house only to hit the one steep spot and wind up sideways, or sliding right back down backward (they'll still have the tire in drive trying to go forward, but the car is going backward), or if they're really unlucky, they wind up skidding into the ditch on the side of the road.
So, sometimes it's bad drivers and some people just need to know they should NEVER drive in the snow. But, sometimes, it's that the snow has packed to ice.
The problem we have here is that it's often not cold enough for the snow to stick when it first starts falling, so it melts on the pavement and gets it all wet, then as the temperature drops overnight, that water layer freezes underneath the snow layer. Sometimes it's better if they don't plow the roads under those conditions, because at least the snow offers some traction while plowing and exposing the ice eliminates any chance.
My first year here, we also had a storm where the snow fell, the sun came out, melted it partway to create slush, then overnight the temperature dropped way below freezing, created a nice thick layer of packed ice, and it remained cold enough that salt just wasn't sufficient to melt it. The snow wasn't so bad, but the next several days of ice were impossible to drive on. If the snow hadn't fallen until the weather turned so cold, it wouldn't have been a big deal at all, because it would have all stayed pretty fluffly and easy to clear or drive on, but that ice from a partial melt before the deep freeze was horrid.
