Things are bad in old Blighty
 

At least weather wise anyway. Apologies for the Daily Mail post but it has some good pics of the Big Freeze. People have been having to sleep overnight in some trains because of the "heavy" snow. A few inches of snow and the country comes to a halt...again!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/ar...econd-day.html

Re: Things are bad in old Blighty
 

I can tell you first hand that it is awful!!! GB has ground to a halt! I'm snowed in - North of England. Middlesbro to be precise! Need to get back to London...interview pending grrrrrr

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It's hardly a few inches. Over 12inch in places that haven't had significant snow in 17 years, if you live on a hill and have no snow equipment other than your feet, you're quite fcked.

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we'll organize a shipment of snowshoes!! These are the kind I grew up with and used.

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a few inches..more like 10 in our area..(York)..but I have to admit the council here are on the ball with clearing and gritting the roads..even the farmers help by doing some of the side roads..they're made of sterner stuff over here..

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This is my sisters back garden about 10 miles from Middlesbrough. They've not been able to get off their estate since the weekend, but my 78 year old mam still walks to the shops for fresh groceries every day....
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My daughter lives in Harrogate and they had a rough time over the weekend when they went into town and returned home (she lives just outside of the center.) And then foolishly she went into Leeds yesterday morning, it took her the whole day to get back.....

Re: Things are bad in old Blighty
 

Well 12" is a few inches ;) Last weeks' snow storms in the PNW looked bad. It didn't quite come to a halt there but it was close:

http://www.viralviralvideos.com/2010...ow-storm-2010/

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Not as bad as two years ago, but it was a little hairy, to be sure. :D

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12 is more than a few, a few is below five isn't it?

Come on, lets get technical. :D

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Here are some 'snow' pictures from the Daily Telegraph.

Getting around might be awful but - wow- some of these shots are beautiful

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/pict...n-Britain.html

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I can well imagine..my friend had to drive back from Harrogate and it took her 5 hours when it normally only takes 30 mins..:eek:

and here's some pics from my neck of the woods..

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Sis and BIL are snowed in and the schools are closed until Monday. That is in SE Scotland. The council are not plowing their side road, so a local farmer came to help out with a tractor and plough.

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Beam me up to North Cal!!

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Up here in the PNW we are quite good at getting into a bit of a pickle when the snow falls, soon get ourselves sorted out though and by the end of the winter it is a breeze...

I must admit being so close to the mountains and the fact it snows every year (except last year) and usually sticks around for a while, I was very surprised with how badly people coped when we first moved here, but like I said once everyone gets themselves organised it works!! :p

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I've got the heating running in my UK house 24/7 :frown:...heating an empty house is better than burst pipes. Been there...done that...got the tee shirt.

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Few = not many but more than one according to this:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/few

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I saved this pic yesterday as I love it, it's on the road just before where my Mum lives and it's usually warmer than the rest of the country there.

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I need to start taking snowblowers and shovels over there next time, I could make a fortune


so that's how our bastard workmen who said it would be a "few" hundred ended up charging us 14 hundred!

Re: Things are bad in old Blighty
 

My dad says he's not seen snow like it in 40 years and to be honest, I don't remember that much snow falling, apart from over last Christmas where we had it bad for 3 weeks. Here's a picture of my parents back garden. They are in Bishopbriggs, just north of Glasgow and their schools have been open but the ones not that far away in a different council region have all been closed, much to the annoyance of my kids who have been harping on about "how come when we leave they get all the snow!!" and "Why don't we have snow!!" and "it's so unfair!!" and blah blah blah!!!!

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Funny how times have changed.. I remember back in the 50s & 60s, if we ever went away during the winter, my father would meticulously drain the pipes to prevent burst pipes. Of course heating was not an option in those days when you were out of the house, since it was mostly coal fires and electric plug-in heaters.

Of course he also unplugged every plug in the house, and defrosted the refrigerator so that going away for holidays was a military operation, especially since it always involved leaving home at the crack of dawn!

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Your pictures didn't work....darn!

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Here's a couple of pictures of my little cuties in their back garden in Harrogate..... Snow is a lot of fun when you have a trampoline and your a kid....:)

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We still switch the water off and drain the hot and cold when we go away! I guess that comes with being married to a plumber! :lol:

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Meanwhile, in Buffalo

:scaredhair:

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isn't that pretty routine for that area? I have clients in far upstate NY who go on about "lake effect snow" and tell me that it's also fairly common to build houses with the main entrance on the upper floor, because if you have the front door on the ground floor you won't be able to get it open after some snowfalls.

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I'm living it!

On the plus side my daughter is chuffed as she built her first ever, unaided-by-parent, snowman. In case you are mad enough to be interested, his name is Al.

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I hope Al is in your yard, and she didn't have to build him on the berm of I-90!

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Thanks. Al sits (slumps) in our yard. I learned quickly to avoid the Thruway even in summer, so travel via the back roads. Which, even through areas where up to 3 feet fell, are quite passable.

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Blimey! middlesbro aint far behind!

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I think that's the problem, on both sides of the pond. Weather that would have been dealt with as a matter of course a decade or two ago now results in chaos. Not because the weather is any different, but because the feckwits who are in charge of dealing with it have flogged off all the equipment, made everybody who knew what they were doing redundant, and spent all the money on conciousness raising seminars in exotic locations.

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It's a wise thing to do with British houses...water tanks upstairs and water feed radiators. We had a burst pipe in our loft one Christmas when we were in Orlando. Our neighbour noticed water coming out of the front door. :eek::eek::eek:

We passed that way a couple of days ago. Syracuse gets worse weather than Buffalo...it gets more of the lake effect snow.

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Really - I remember people grumbling about mis-management and snow on the rails (or leaves), not enough gritting lorries etc at least 30 years ago.

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The main problem with the UK is it's not very flat in the worst affected areas. People used to get about more on foot as well. And also I feel people have forgotten how to cope on their own, as soon as they are made to do much on their own they fart, collapse and blame the government for not helping them.

Also the sheer volume of snow and record low temps together haven't been seen in the UK since the 1960's. But fewer and fewer people will want to stand on their own two and get on with helping themselves.

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Aye, I was watching the radars for those areas and it was really piling up coming off of the lakes!

We get shafted when the winds come towards the west, the snow can dump down a few inches an hour! Thankfully its rare and normally Indiana and Michigan gets it!

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Fair point, 10 years was probably a bit optimistic (about my age if nothing else) but it's certainly true that if you go back a quarter century things functioned (albeit while we enjoyed a grumble) and the country didn't shut down.

This is also true, although I'm dubious about the "record" bit. Seems like everything's a record something, these days, especially when things go tits up and somebody needs an excuse.

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Don't be, look at the met office website I'm sure they aren't going to make it up. My dad remembers the snow in Bradford, Birkenshaw to be precise drifting over 20ft. It's not the flattest part of the world either but people coped. For me I can't comprehend 20ft of snow, I guess that's why Englands having such a hard time dealing with it.

Last year I said, "Next year there will be no excuse for not coping" well I guess the sheer volume in snow is a good excuse but NEXT year it has to be even worse or there will be no good reason!

I'd love to write to the transport department with some good suggestions other than the "It's not good enough" complaints I keep hearing.

Designated snow routes would be a good start! No parking over 3 inch of snow and they take the main brunt of the gritting and plowing.

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We've had a bit of a dusting other than that just cold

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It's good to know the emergency services are working in UK. I guess somebody should have told this woman what 999 is really for. At least she didn't get served with the wrong McD's order ;)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-11908583

Re: Things are bad in old Blighty
 

A few inches of snow.....hmmmmm......I put on my wellies and waded out into the back garden and stuck a measuring tape down into the most level looking part of the snow cover.....it sank down into the snow until it would not go any lower and the scale read 33cms of the white stuff....in Imperial America that would measure almost 13 inches. Against a fence it worked out at 46cms - 18 inches. Maybe by American standards that is a "few" inches but hereabouts in the western suburbs of Edinburgh, Scotland, it's a wee bit of a lot. My dog George quite likes the stuff and I can always tell whereabouts in the garden he has cocked his leg.

Today is the first in eleven days that the temperature has risen above feeezing point here - currently it stands at a positively sweltering +1.2C and the air flow as swung round to the south west but this relief is only temporary according to the local weather gurus - the freezing weather promises to return on Sunday night/Monday morning and will probably last for the whole of next week. Oh joy! :frown:

There have been tragedies - in one place in Cumbria, England two pensioners were found dead in the snow in their garden - I don't know the exact circumstances but I gater they died of hypothermia.

Of course the UK always get's caught on the hop whenever severe weather (severe by British standards and this time it really has been severe) hits us. We had plenty of warning from the Met Office but still the authorities seem to be "unprepared" for it, and Health and Safety wimpishness comes into play on a grand scale - schools close down, people cop out of going to work, and train and bus timetables become pure fiction. But seriously, in all fairness, getting about in all this sh*t this time round really hasn't been a picnic even for the most able bodied of us, on foot or behind the wheel.

But it isn't just us Brits who have witnessed widespread disruption. According to one the the UK's national newspapers today 04/12 (and no, it wasn't the Daily Mail!) other Northern European countries similarly affected by adverse severe winter weather conditions have been scenes of chaos made up of blocked roads, non operational airports, cancelled train services and road transport and disruption of public services. Actually I found all that quite a relief to know that it only isn't us Brits who are f*****g useless at coping with a real winter. :D

Anyway, I'm quite enjoying today's (seemingly temporary) "heatwave". It actually rained a wee bit earlier on this morning.

Of course, as the very oldest people never fail to rmind us youngers, that winters really were winters in the past. I have checked records and read books and articles.

In 1947 the whole of the UK was buried under deep snow from mid January to the middle of March continuously, with snow drifs reaching up to the roof tops in many areas. It was a time of severe fuel and power shortages, strict food rationing, and very few people had their own transport. Temperatures remained below freezing for weeks on end and power cuts were frequent. There was no social security then as we know it today - no winter fuel payments for pensioners or cold weather payments for poorer people. Rivers froze from bank to bank and ice floes became blocked beow Tower Bridge in London.

On 22 December 1962 bitterly cold easterly winds swept in from Northern Russia and stayed....for almost three months. On Boxing Day 1962 the snows arrived and even if a day late it remained deep and crisp an even....for almost three months. On 29/30 December 1962 a snow blizzard paralysed much of southern Britain and, as the late comedian Kenneth Williams says in his famous diaries, published in book form by Russell Davies: "Snow lies over a foot deep with deeper drifts in central London but still the London buses are running -the London bus drivers are "wonderful - all of them!"

The snow and the bitter cold persisted until the first week of March 1963. The sea froze for a mile or more out from the shore in many places - at Ramsgate in Kent the harbour was frozen over and a car drove across the River Dee, from bank to bank, at Chester. At Cambridge students took a short cut to their various colleges by walking along the frozen River Cam.

If any such winters occurred in the UK again, a country now vastly different in so many ways to what it was in either 1947 or 1963, the chaos and economic damage would be almost unimaginable. Let's hope it won't happen now - after all, we've just experienced the coldest November weather ever recorded in the UK.