Monday, February 02, 2009

"Worst" Snow in 18 Years - UK is in Crisis


A nice snowfall started on Sunday evening, with big flakes falling down. Today in the morning, the streets were covered with a few cm of snow. And as it happened in December, also this time the traffic broke down.
One of the reasons is of course that there is very rarely true snowfall here in the UK - winters are usually mild, and the temperature rarely falls below 0 C. But when it does, and when then a few snowflakes fall down, the country cannot cope with it because it is not as prepared as for example Canada, or the Northern US. There are too few "critters" (these are the vehicles which spay sand and salt). So many of the side roads remain snowy.
Also, nobody here ever puts winter tires onto their vehicles; I am not sure if they even exist here. So I experienced today when driving, what it means to drive uphill on a road full of snow sleet just with regular summer tires, and to feel the sliding to the side etc.
Snow kept intermittently falling today, sometimes just a bit of flurry, sometimes thick heavy flakes.
The weather report says we will get more snow through the night.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi, I keep following your blog for some specific reasons. I have used two of your snaps in my blog. If you have any objection I will remove them. Thanks. Have a Gr8 day.

Reinhold Behringer said...

Hi Potpourrii, thanks for your comment! No problem - you can use the pictures in your blog.

Am curious what are the specific reasons for following my blog...

Anonymous said...

Nice article.
Thanks for posting ;-)