Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Make it stop.


Last night, a full four days of digging after the first storm hit, we finally got our neighborhood's roads cleared to the main road and got vehicles out. Yesterday was 12 hours of neighbors moving snow with the front end loaders on two tractors. Digging ATVs out by hand, pulling tractors out with other tractors, and pulling those tractors out with trucks. We even managed to get a bobcat stuck for a while!

When the next wave of snow hit, we went out last night one more time to clear the roads. So much hard work went into it, we hated to see them get covered again. This morning we were out early, trying to keep them open. But this one quickly escalated to whiteout conditions with dangerous drifts and we were forced to move vehicles to the end of the road and wait this one out. In an emergency we could get a vehicle out, but with less than 6 hours of snowfall left, it'd have to be a pretty big emergency to get me on the road right now. I went with my neighbor to a nearby gas station to fill up the diesel cans, and there were uncomfortable spans where blowing snow reduced visibility to, literally, nothing.

The 20" snow we got in December was a curiosity. It's interesting how different my mindset is for these latest back-to-back blizzards. I'm taking a couple pictures but nothing like in December. And I have no interest whatsoever in measuring snowfall. All future winter storms will be compared to this week. And, with any luck, none will come close.

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