The city was blanketed by a foot or so of snow over the past few days. The snow started on Saturday, and continued off and on through Monday. The powder has a base of ice, with another crust of ice on the top, making anything from driving to walking difficult to do. Pretty much everything was closed on Monday, and it looks like most things will stay shut down on Tuesday. North of here, big cities (DC, NYC, Boston, etc.) received as much as three feet, and south of here received freezing rain. Anybody have any good snow stories?
News and meta-news about Charlottesville, VA, since 2001.
Sideblog
Police announced this afternoon that their investigation into what was initially believed to be a fatal fire on Rugby Avenue is now a homicide investigation. #
The Virginia Supreme Court has denied George Huguely’s appeal. His second-degree murder conviction will stand, WRIC reports. #
In a carefully worded story, and not citing specific sources, WTVR reports that forensic evidence belonging to Jesse Matthew Jr., the main suspect in the disappearance of Hannah Graham, matches forensic evidence collected during the investigation of Morgan Harrington’s 2009 murder. #
In the wake of Hannah Graham’s disappearance, and the evidence that came from private security footage, city officials are revisiting the question of installing security cameras on the downtown mall. #
Both Charlottesville Registrar Sheri Iachetta and former Electoral Board member Stephanie Commander have turned themselves in to the police on
foursix and four felony counts of embezzlement, respectively. #Ten years ago, the National Institutes of Health budget doubled and schools like the University of Virginia built massive new research facilities. A decade later, those buildings remain largely underutilized. NPR visits UVA in this story on the effect of federal binge and spurge spending in the sciences. #
In 2012, Council approved a new student housing complex on West Main—now some council members are questioning whether what they were shown matches what was built. #
The Architectural Review Board has approved a bike-themed mural on West Market, below the McGuffey Art Center, although at least one member expressed concerns that it might look like the bicyclists were riding away from Charlottesville’s downtown. #
City Police Chief Tim Longo is meeting with city leaders to work on protocols regarding the use of military surplus police weapons in Charlottesville. #
A 100-year-old Colonnades resident received military honors for her service in the WWII Women’s Army Corps #
-
Archive for Sideblog »
One good snow story: my wife and I racked up a bunch of good-deed points helping folks push their cars out of snow banks. Plus, who doesn’t love bumming at home on a snow day!
Another good snow story… snow sledding down a hill behind my house at 1 AM…
Here in Schuyler, we only got about 6 inches of insanely small snow… it is a little icier than it sounds like it is in CVille (with no school, no reason to go into town).
A snow-plow got stuck on our road. It was one of the big ones with the salt dispenser on the back. He slid into the ditch that runs along our yard, and when he hit the bottom, it dropped a nice big pile of salt right in our yard.
The driver tried to get out for a bit, then called for a tow. Instead of a tow, his boss showed up. His boss then proceeded to get it a heckuva lot more stuck. Then *he* called for a tow.
A little while later, a back-hoe shows up. After a lot of trying, he finally managed to pull the plow out of our ditch. He then scraped our road into better condition than any of the roads around us. It *still* is in better condition than any of the roads around us. Unfortunately, though, it’s a cul-de-sac, so you still have to navigate poorly-plowed roads to get anywhere.
Oh, and we’ve been using the spilled salt on our sidewalk and porch. We’ve been giving it to our neighbors too, who have also used the spilled salt on their porches, sidewalks, and driveways.
Most of it oughtta be gone by morning. Anything that’s left gets tossed into the street so that we can eventually grow grass there again. :)
At my parents, my dad with my help cleared out the driveway. What a task! So after doing that, my father had thrown out the salt to melt the rest of ice. Well, I guess one bird thought it was bird seed and decided to swoop down and eat it. Then another bird showed up. And in 5 mins, it looked like a scene from a Hitchcock movie. I think there was at least 50 birds outside. I think they ate the salt but then was hanging out in the trees of my parents’ front yard. Next thing you know it, there was a bird crap all of the freaking place. It looked like spots in the snows.
So be warned about doing the salt thing!
I’m stuck in Sugar Hollow waiting for our snow plow guy to get to the driveway, and last we heard he was waiting for VDOT to clear the secondary roads.
It’s sort of amazing how primitive the information system still is when it comes to highway conditions. There’s no way for an ordinary person to know whether road X is clear except by calling a neighbor, and if you don’t have a neighbor on road X, well… I imagine that within a few years all the VDOT trucks will have GPS locators and some kind of system that provides real-time tracking of their clearing activities, so people will be able to check online status maps. But we’re not there yet.
I lived on 122nd Street in Manhattan for a year while attending Columbia, and was there during a major dump of snow. I spent some time at an intersection with another guy, helping push people driving south out of Harlem who couldn’t negotiate the rise there. It was great fun, everyone was real appreciative, thumbs up, etc.–except for one guy, a classic gold-chain and furs dude in a pink Cadillac, who just looked straight ahead as we pushed him back to where he could get traction, not letting the expression on his face change a millimeter. No way he was going to acknowledge the services of a couple of peons. Coolest human being I’ve ever encountered.
And I’m an idiot. I should’ve tossed it back onto the street last night. It melted clean down to the dirt. No grass is going to grow there for years now. Ugh.
where are the roving guys with shovels who will dig dig your car out for a fee? i’d pay more money than I thought I would for someone to come over and shovel my driveway. (husband has strained back, toddler son requires too much monitoring for me to shovel while he plays, etc.).
maybe they’re in another neighborhood. though I’d have thought mine would be a prime candidate…
where are the roving guys with shovels who will dig dig your car out for a fee?
They’re probably busy pulling helping push stuck motorists back on the road, for a fee. A friend of mine got more than $200 doing this yesterday, and he wasn’t even asking for any money!
The beauty of all-wheel drive set in, this storm. My stationwagon pulled itself right out of the 8 inches of frozen snow it was sitting in and trundled a good 100ft to the (unplowed) street without putting up much of a fuss. Getting my girlfriend’s shiny new Volvo, however, took the better part of an hour. Hooray for Subaru and Audi!
I live in BFE. I saw a plow going by on sunday but when I looked closer I noticed his blade was UP. Monday, no plow at all. Ok, well thats normal I guess, this is the middle of nowhere.
This morning I heard a plow and went to look, it wasn’t a plow at all! It was a bulldoser! Apparently the snow was too heavy for a truck to push. There are still tank-tread marks in the road.
Monday morning I walked an hour to open the video store where I work. I unlocked the door and pushed, only to discover it could not be opened.
Luckily we have a back door and a snow shovel. I walked around the building to the other side of the front door only to discover that the maintenance man had cleared the whole sidewalk in the front of the building…except for in front of the video store. Our customers and our employees were the only ones who would have been in that building the whole weekend, yet he decided to start plowing at the opposite end, only to have his snowplow give out right before he could clear our doorstep. Our building manager is the best, but for the next 30 minutes of shovelling I cursed his name.
The potential employees of said venture demanded $20 / hour and full health care coverage. Since the snow was so heavy, worker’s compensation insurance would have been too high and the level of safety would not have met the standards set forth by the North American Brotherhood of Snow Removal Engineers, unless the workday was limited to 4 hours on, 20 hours off.
There was also some issues on titles – the company wanted to call the employees "snow shovelers", however the union demanded "Snow Removal Specialist." Management countered with "Snow Removal Associate", however that was turned down as well.
After 48+ hours of negotiations, everyone went home to shovel out their own cars. They agreed to met again sometime in early July.
Be careful where you put the salt – some types of surfaces can be damaged significantly by salt over time. I was specifically warned about aggregate sidewalks – the salt supposedly eats away at it and will cause stones to start coming up.
Not sure if this is a fact – but it makes sense.
Salt does corrode metals (like the underside of your car) but doesn’t corrode concrete. That is to say it doesn’t chemically attack concrete.
It does however aid in physically attacking concrete. By reducing the freezing point of water, it can increase the frequency of freeze/thaw cycles. In addition, salt water expands about twice as much as pure water when it freezes, putting more stress on the concrete with each cycle.
4 wheel drive is cool, but has everyone forgot wheel *chains*? In ice and packed snow, they work even better (but keep the speed under 15 mph) to get you out of nowhere.
We had a fire truck (!) get stuck on the side street next to ours. We let them use our shovel, and the dog seemed pretty excited. A fire truck! It took about an hour for them to get anywhere. And yesterday the neightborhood dug it’s cars out. Then the plow came along in the middle of the night and blocked us all in again. Phooey.
I lived in NJ for the 1996 storm. It seems up there, every guy in any kind of construction had a plow they could hook up to their truck. They mostly did parking lots, but they did plow some smaller roads. It made plowing FAST. I lived on a main road through several towns… it was never covered with snow.
We had a plow come through with its blade up right when the snow was stopping. They didn’t really clear the road until 10PM last night.
Heh, I was helping push a fellow out the other day. He was very nice and polite, and grateful for the help.
While pushing him out, another fellow got himself stuck while we watched him. We went up to offer him a push, and he displayed a similar attitude to the cool guy in your story. We tried a couple of pushes. That didn’t do it, and we walked away.
Life’s too short to spend too much effort on people like that.