#skating rink. I like it when the plows remove the snow....exposing the ice beneath. We had a conference call recently on driving on snow and ice, and one of our techs stated that he was from the South and didn't know how to drive on snow and ice, and that he would just stay home. I opined that NOBODY knows how to drive on ice, and that most of the people who get tangled up in pileups or wind up in a ditch with four tires in the air are people who (mistakenly) think that one can drive on the stuff. 4x4 drivers are my favorite, followed by AWDs who think that delivering varying amounts of power to four spinning tires is better than just two. At least some of the Jeep drivers have winches that they can sometimes use to put their tires back on the ice. Judging by the license plates that I see in the deep South, I didn't think that anybody actually LIVED in Montreal in December!!!!
I was idly thinking yesterday: could the snow plow guy have stopped his slide by lowering the plow as hard as possible? Who knows. All in all: wrong place at wrong time.
De-icing is WAAAAY outside my normal depth band, but I thought that the blade WAS down. Don't they use a non-metallic lower edge to prevent road damage? Looking again, this wasn't a front-end loader, but a truck with a snow plow bolted to the front end. Useful for pushing the snow out of the way, but not much else. You are right though. Wrong place....Wrong time.
Reviewing the video, I agree. But I don't know if it has the controls to push it below the front wheels, like a common bulldozer. Yes and no. The use of protective rubber instead of more effective steel edges on the snowplows was a contributing factor to Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels losing his re-election bid. There were many other and larger factors too, angering Seattle voters over the dismal road department performance during that storm: very few snowplows, no road salt, botched bus system preparation, and a new city DOT chief from a warm climate with no snow experience. And that chief made a particular effort to ensure the mayor's route from home to office was very well cleared very quickly, leaving the mayor clueless about how bad the conditions were for everyone else.
I recall seeing a cop doing a low speed spin, similar to the video. This was on a level road too, that had turned into a skating rink. He was in the next block, and we were all crawling along, afternoon, homeward bound "rush" hour. I pulled off on a side street and parked. You could barely walk on it, so slick. Hoofed it to my father-in-law's, hung out there through dinner. Returned to my car around 8 pm: it was all festooned in icicles. Started fine, pretty much no one left on the road, and the salt truck had gone through: no problems.
