Yesterday was a lovely day: clear, bright and sunny, with very little wind. It was also very cold overnight (about -10°C). This mean that the snow has started to melt where the sun hits it for any length of time, a condition that precludes our street.
We are seeing some interesting shapes
when the snow melts then freezes again
when the snow melts then freezes again
In a comment on this blog a couple of days ago, Bengt mentioned that their road was snowplowed last Thursday at 10.30, with couple of follow-up treatments (including gritting) the same morning.We must be in the poorer part of town: We had a tractor unsuccessfully try clear the street on Thursday afternoon - he went as far as he could up the hill, pushing snow in front of him, lost traction, and reversed down the hill again, leaving a wall of snow outside Sylvie and Pierre-Yves' house. This left a nice compact layer of snow which froze overnight into a sheet of ice which has remained in place. The ice was so slippery that the front wall of our house has been in danger of cars sliding into it - some very near misses over the 4 days.
The snowplough retreats, having failed to clear our road
Then on Monday, the road was gritted - by hand. A man in a van, with a bag of salt he spread with a shovel on the worse parts of the ice. This had very little effect.The ice sheet on Monday.
Yesterday, another attempt was made to grit our road, this time from the bucket of a tractor.
We hope this latest assault will do the trick, because even walking to the boulangerie has been fraught (fraught I tell you) the past couple of days.Simon
4 comments:
Your winter is worse than ours at the moment. I would have thought that rather unusual. Today we have a heavy frost and fog.
I'm not feeling your pain. We've had about 30 inches of snow in February and they're all still out there. And we live in Ohio. We can't even ski it's so flat!
Jean. It was lovely this morning, but it's raining again now.
Paulita - no pain, just amusement at how long it all took to clear about 6 inches on snow!
Thing is, simon, that thin layer of slippery stuff is just as lethal as many more inches of snow. The fracture clinics here are bursting at the seams with broken arms, wrists, ankles and shoulders.
Fraught doesn't begin to describe the terror of having to make your way "a pied" on a thin layer of ice.
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