Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Not a blizzard

"It was whiter than a tea party rally."
David Letterman

8:30 PM: Late afternoon photo. This isn't a blizzard. It's very much a kid's big no-school snowstorm, snowman day. At no time has it been so snowy, windy, & cold you couldn't dress in layers & go outside. I chose not to. Try doing that in a rainy Jersey winter noreastern when the sleet flies sideways & the roads are flooded & power lines snap under the ice. Our streets are snow-covered but plowed. Anyone with a car parked out there is snowed in only until they dig it out. I think it requires a media hysteria just to make people do the sensible thing & stay home if they can. When there's a storm like last weekend's in South Jersey, it becomes obvious what one can & cannot do. There's plenty of people in emergency & medical services, public safety, transit, & power utilities, who must get to their jobs. The fewer vehicles on the road, the safer it is for them.

Predict a foot of snow up in hilly North Jersey, they just go in their garages & pull the tarps off the snow blowers.

Somewhere I have photos of the 1996 blizzard. There were 8 foot drifts in Rahway & huge plow piles on the roads. I was parked on a side street, & that was a tough dig. But the cars sheltered in my apt building garage couldn't get out for 36 hours, the pickup truck plow didn't have the power to push the snowdrifts. Plow got stuck for awhile. Landlord had to hire guys with shovels to cut drifts down & make them plowable.
***
1:30: Substantial amount of mushy snow on the ground, still coming in off of the ocean on a breeze, 32 degrees, but the wind is slowly shifting northward, & the forecasters say were gonna have blizzard-like conditions soon.
***
Rutgers 54, Seton Hall 44
Attendance: 101

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Comments:
I was living in Jersey City during the 1996 blizzard. Some (*^#!*% left his van in the intersection outside my apartment for a few days. This meant that the plows were unable to come down the street. Since I walked to work this was not a problem except when I realized that I had tickets for a Devils game coming up and I needed my car. Multiple calls to Jersey City DPW and my Councilman were in vain, but my street was eventually cleared the afternoon of the game.
 
I have pictures of that 1996 blizzard, too. I was living in Hoboken, then. Three feet of snow. The city was shut down for 3 days. The city had bulldozers loading snow into big railroad-type shipping containers which they were transporting to the river and dumping. There was no room on the streets for piled up snow. I owned a tiny 4-wheel drive GEO Tracker at the time, and I had, I think, the first passenger vehicle moving on the streets of Hoboken after the storm. It was a nimble little thing and I always said that I could parallel park it in a spot slightly smaller then the vehicle itself. Those were the days. I'll have to go look for those photos ...
 
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