It was -16 degrees Celsius according to my power fc yesterday morning lol I couldn't get the car to start for the life of me till it warmed later that afternoon

 

My first mode of transportation was a super-shitty '81 Yamaha Virago 750. I remember sitting in the garage with a hairdryer on the carbs, trying to get it started. I couldn't, ended up riding my bicycle ~8 miles to school and work.



edit: Just remembered the rest of that day, as if wasn't bad enough. Had a flat after work, walked the bike 2 miles to a bike shop, then rode the rest of the way home. I hated that Virago.

 

thats nothing in Jersey we've had almose 4ft so far

 

Yeah, you guys in new england get the full brunt of lake effect storms. We only get whatever sweeps down off lake Michigan.

 

We haven't gotten the one load big dumps like the east coast, but our warm spells have been short lived so the snow falls have accumulated into having a lot of snow.. Usually we can handle it and we don't have to move it around much, but this year its gotten to the point many places are hiring gravel trucks to move it out to snow melt pits.

But at least even with many minor snowfalls , traffic keeps moving and what not, when you get 4 ft dumps, everything comes to a standstill.

 

I saw a news story the other day about a salt mine, and how many tons of salt are tossed on roads every year. I've always wondered, isn't there some huge environmental impact of all that running into rivers/lakes/etc.?

 

Thats a good question. Its naturally occurring but probably not in the areas or distribution its being used in. Here they have switched to Calcium chloride that just does a total number on your car. We use it in brines for refrigeration, but we add inhibitor and remove the oxygen from it so it won't eat the steel pipes. But in open air in raw form its highly corrosive to lots of different metals. Our local governments don't seem to give a damn about this. Sometimes they spray it in liquid form on the streets downtown, it dries out then gets sucked into aluminium fins on HVAC equipment which are pressure bonded to copper.. Dissimilar metals plus salt equal total corrosion, it becomes a battery, your 50,000.00 Chiller condenser gets eaten to nothing but bare tubes in 5-10 years.

The stupid thing about using salt especially here is the eutectic point. If you get the concentrations to strong, the freezing point of the solution actually goes back up. This seems to cause a lot of crashes, they salt the living daylights out of road, and for some reason there is a big patch of black ice with small weather change.

 

I miss texas and georgia. Hell im sitting here in afghanistan, last 3 weeks have been nothing but snow for the most part. Hell the 15 days i got to go home on leave back to georgia it decided it wanted to snow there. Its bull crap lol.

 

They don't get snow in bagdad lol. At night during winter temps will drop to around freezing though