Come On Down!
Current weather advisories for the Northern Gulf Coast:
… Wind Advisory in effect from 9 PM this evening to 6 PM CST Monday…
… Freeze warning in effect from 4 am to 10 am CST Monday…
… Hard freeze warning in effect from 9 PM Monday to 10 am CST Tuesday…
… Wind Chill Advisory in effect from 9 PM Monday to 9 am CST Tuesday…
Just grab your mukluks and parka and head on down to see the Gulf of Mexico through the frost-rimed windows of an inadequately heated condo. You need to find a way that doesn’t involve crossing a bridge or using an overpass, because they will be coated with ice and no one here knows how to drive on ice.
7 comments
Ouch. I guess this nasty cold weather is all over. We had snow all day. We may not have ice, but I’m not planning on driving anywhere.
I’m already counting the dead fleas (yay!). also the dollars this is going to cost me in heating a drafty uninsulated old house (ouch).
thanks for the reminder about bridges. hopefully I’ll still remember this tomorrow morning and take an alternate route to work.
Snow is much better than ice. If you don’t have spiked tires or chains, and speed change going over the local bridges that are all build with ‘hills’ to allow boats to pass underneath will leave you sideways. I’m close enough to the bridge over the Bayou that I will hear the crashes when they happen.
It’s the fact that it rains just infront of the cold fronts that causes us problems. The rain stops and the thermometer drops.
The rain stops and thermometer drops issue is why one friend moved away from Cincinnati. The rain would fall on the already-existing ice on the roads, not melt it, but merely add to it because the ground and roads were still below freezing due to the thermal battery effect. It led to some… interesting… driving even with snow tires, so even people who grow up with ice have problems with it, not just Floridians.
The black ice in West Texas was the nastiest surface I have ever been on.
We used studded tires on the patrol cars in the winter, because it usually rained and then changed to snow at sundown. Even the studded tires would get slick until it got cold enough to clear out the treads.
I’m very glad that there was not any really bad weather on my Christmas trip this year. The very light rain that hit San Antonio on my way back home was the worst and while it snarled traffic in San Antonio big time, it didn’t really affect me. There was one year when I wasn’t so lucky, I was living in North Carolina at the time and driving a little Kia and was doing I-20 across Alabama and Mississippi. So I hit a patch of ice on a bridge, felt the rear end start to come around, and pushed in the clutch and countersteered like you’re supposed to and luckily hit pavement still straight enough that I didn’t flip. At all the other bridges that I came to after that, I slowed to a near stop and put my emergency flashers on and crawled over them… only to be passed half the time by some moron in a giant pickup truck who gave me the finger out the window. When I got over the bridge I generally saw them in the ditch, sometimes upside down. I had a cell phone with me (which was a *big deal* in those days, only rich people and techno-geeks had them, ordinary people didn’t) but I never stopped to call the cops or give them help. Way I figured it, they were assholes, what, they thought I was going across that bridge like an old man because I *wanted* to? So (shrug).
I ended up having to do the whole trip non-stop to my mom’s house in central Louisiana, because every time I’d pull off and try to find a hotel room, the parking lot was full of utility company trucks from elsewhere in the USA and the rooms were all full of utility crews. And it was too frickin’ cold to just pull off and nap, I tried it once, but had to give up after a few minutes because with the engine off it was too cold (and I’m not an idiot, I’m not going to idle a car while I’m trying to sleep). So I ended up at my mother’s house at around 3AM, and man, let me tell ya, I was tired…
I used to do the Cinco to San Diego run in 3 days. The middle day was Texas. Yeah, no matter how you do it there is a whole lot of nothing to cross when the weather is decent.
That I-12 bypass around New Orleans would be really exciting with ice on it, as there surely was this week. I-10 has been stop and go with multiple accidents, especially semis and SUVs losing control and ending wheels up in the ditch.
Most of the local icing was caused by people who forgot to turn off their sprinkler systems. It’s not like we have needed any irrigation this year, but people don’t think about and let the systems run.
Well, we’re back to normal, but I doubt it will be 20 years before it happens again, as this may be the new normal.