Saturday, December 27, 2008

Covered In Ice

Yesterday morning when I went outside, I discovered everything was covered in ice. Unfortunately, I never thought at the time to take any pictures of the ice that was everywhere. The photos here are from a week ago, but they still fit the story, you'll see.

I've talked before about our unpredictable weather here. Well, we've gone from bitter cold to warm and raining. This morning it was too warm to snow, so it rained. The big problem was that it was still cold enough for the rain to freeze once it touched the ground.

And it did freeze in a big way. It wasn't a very big ice storm, as far as ice storms go, but it was just big enough to cause problems for anyone who was stupid enough to venture out. That would be me. I didn't really want to be out there, but sometimes you just can't avoid these things. I almost turned right around and went back inside.

As soon as got outside, I saw that there was ice covering everything, including my truck. Ice is probably the worst thing to have to scrape off of a vehicle. You only have to push snow off, but as I said, you have to scrape ice. It's not easy, and you have to get it off the windshield to see anything. Not fun at all!

I got the truck cleaned off and drove out to the road. There were car accidents every few blocks on my street alone. It was like driving on a wet sheet of glass. One false move and you could end up crashing your car. Hit the brakes to hard and you'd never stop.

The only thing to do was to drive very slowly, and be very careful with you brakes. Not everyone understands this, even people who've experienced this kind of thing before. That makes extra problems for everyone. Even if your driving is fine, someone else might have a problem close by your car. Then you're both in trouble.

I saw people that didn't want to use any common sense. They were driving way too fast, and too close to other vehicles. They were sliding around all over the place, but they still didn't have the sense to slow down. You would think they would begin to understand. Where is their sense of danger?

Others were in accidents even when they did nothing wrong. There was a car that had slid off the road into a snowbank. He was stuck with no way out. No rescue would come for hours, because everyone was busy. He'd have to wait his turn. There were others like that along the way, but to many to talk about.

I did what I had to do without incident, and I was grateful that I made it back home safe and sound. After getting back home, I decided that today wasn't really a good day to go back out. If it's not the cold stopping me, it's something else. Maybe tomorrow will work out a little better.


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6 comments:

  1. I had the experience in skidding my motorcycle on a road with spilled oil. It was just out of control.
    Both experiences sound no good at all.

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  2. Rainfield61 - Good example. Skidding on oil would be pretty close to the same thing as trying to drive on this ice.

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  3. Very, very dangerous. I'm glad you made it back okay.

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  4. Thanks Jodapoet. I let out a big breath when I got home.

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  5. Becareful ya driving....even so the snowing
    from. hecoree.blogspot.com

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  6. Nomore - It wasn't easy to be careful then, so I was happy to get back home.

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