Metropol

Should we be prepared for these conditions though, if they only happen once every twenty years it would be an obscene waste of money to have the staffing and equipment all on standby every winter period for a cold snap which probably won't come.

What gets me the most is how most people seem to think the bad weather is entierly the fault of the councils and gritter drivers in particular. We used to be self sufficient - if the weather was bad, either we adapted how we travelled, or gave it up as a bad job and stayed at home. Today it seems you have to try and drive like there's no snow resulting in you having to abandon you car somewhere, or complain as loudly as possible that the local council are a bunch of timewasters sat around when they should be outside your house making it possible for you to do what you want.

We had all the snow a couple of weeks ago in Sheffield (one to two feet fell overnight across the entire city, including where I live, within metres of the ring road), so the local papers round here have had non-stop coverage of the local grit situation, complete with thousands upon thousands of people complaining that the council has not done enough to help them, and they want a refund on their council tax. I still don't know exactly what they expected the council to do to stop the roads being blocked by over a foot of snow falling in less than 12 hours, but I'm pretty sure they don't want to have to pay for it.

What gets me the most is how most people seem to think the bad weather is entierly the fault of the councils and gritter drivers in particular. We used to be self sufficient - if the weather was bad, either we adapted how we travelled, or gave it up as a bad job and stayed at home. Today it seems you have to try and drive like there's no snow resulting in you having to abandon you car somewhere, or complain as loudly as possible that the local council are a bunch of timewasters sat around when they should be outside your house making it possible for you to do what you want.

I'm afraid I don't agree here at all. The police and the council (who both receive good council tax money) do have a duty of care to try and keep the roads and the streets safe. It astounds me that in the pursuit of this there is always a huge sum of money available to spend on trying to understand why little Johnny from a broken home likes to go about mugging old ladies in order to keep the streets safer, but when it comes to more fundamental things, like trying to get ice off them which make them unsafe to walk or drive on, only lip service is paid because apparently gritters and men with shovels cost more money than can be afforded.

The two cold snaps in January and December which have bookended this year have brought home to me the message that despite the local council 'doing its best' to keep the roads safe, you are basically on your own. All the 'effort' has involved in Plymouth is a solitary gritter driving around a few main arterial roads at 3 in the morning after everything has iced over, and then that's it for the day. That the few roads treated remain passable through the day is only because of people driving on them rather than anything else.

There has been no attempt at all (by the council) to try and de-ice the pavements even on major throughfares where the road surface did get gritted (causing people to draw the - sadly quite resaonable - conclusion that walking in the road is less of a health hazard than walking on the pavement), and even quite heavily used roads have seen no gritting at all. There are major roads in Plymouth which happen to be hilly where I'm quite convinced that if you lost your footing you would slide away to your death into cars at the bottom of the road which would never be able to stop on the ice rink they are driving on. The police have closed major access roads which provide the only vehicular access to hundreds of houses because they are too dangerous to even attempt to pass - yet there hasn't been and there *won't* be any attempt at all to clear them, it will just be a matter of waiting for everything to thaw out.

In January, that took almost two weeks.

I don't expect councils to invest the infrastructure to de-ice every seldom-used lane and obscure back street, but I *do* expect more than this for road-users, and I *do* expect SOMETHING for pedestrians.

If we had received a foot of snow down here like some parts of the country I would understand that it is beyond the council's reasonable ability to do much. But when we've only had a light dusting down here, it's not acceptable to see virtually the entire road network (and the pavements too) turned into an unnavigable deathtrap with only nature's good time rather than human intervention restoring it to normal.

dosxuk wrote:Should we be prepared for these conditions though, if they only happen once every twenty years it would be an obscene waste of money to have the staffing and equipment all on standby every winter period for a cold snap which probably won't come.

Ah, but where three or four years ago I would have agreed with you, I don't anymore. As for the past two years we've had this weather, which has had the same effect both years. It seems, what with Global Warming, we're going to see this weather on a form of a yearly occurrence now, so I do believe we need to start preparing for it.

I agree with Alexia on the Snow plows, and that there should be more of them. I haven't seen one of them in all of this, just Gritters going down the road during the middle of the day after so many people have already gone sliding down them to work. Ridiculous.

It seems, what with Global Warming, we're going to see this weather on a form of a yearly occurrence now, so I do believe we need to start preparing for it.

No. Just, no.

I agree with Alexia on the Snow plows, and that there should be more of them. I haven't seen one of them in all of this, just Gritters going down the road during the middle of the day after so many people have already gone sliding down them to work. Ridiculous.

You wanna pay? It's not just expensive buy snow ploughs, it's to keep them maintained and stored all the time they're not used, keep drivers trained, people on standby. Based on the stats so far it'd be a colossal gamble financially, at a time councils have less money.

cwathen wrote:I'm afraid I don't agree here at all. The police and the council (who both receive good council tax money) do have a duty of care to try and keep the roads and the streets safe.

... within the bounds of what is practicable. To expect the impossible is potty, and your council tax doesn't foot that kind of bill - there are thousands of other things that money goes towards too.

There's absolutely an argument about unprepared councils failing to procure or store enough grit when its a regular winter - you know the kind of thing - a couple of days of snow and then a week of slushy messy roads.

But this?

When they start wheeling out "worst since '62" etc on the news, then its really time to revise your expectations down - or ask yourself what YOU think is possible and practicable to achieve to magic away all this snow and ice.

Or, get a pick axe and take your frustration out on the sheet ice that's stopping you get your car into a housing estate.

Either way, get real about it.

The issue isn't equipment alone, the main difference between 1963 and today is that Car Ownership is now al but universal, as a result where people live has altered. When I was at school in the 1960's The head and his deputy of the local primary school lived in the village so could manage a freeze easily and effectively. I believe the nearest member of staff now lives FOUR miles away. A similar situation exists with the Gritting teams, getting them to the salt distribution yards is the major issue, rather than equipment. The staff don't live 'on top of the office' anymore.

A Cost Benefit Analysis for 2010 would almost certainly find that the level of investment is about right and that it'd be a significant step up in costs to go further, which frankly can't be justified on historic UK trends.

As others have said some personal and corporate responsibilty needs to be exercised.

As with most things it seems to depend on where you live and what your council have done. Here, Suffolk County Council have seemingly been spreading grit/salt for at least a month. Consequently the main gritted routes have remained open. They've even been gritting their secondary routes which mean we can all drive to the schools. This morning they started to grit and clear the pavements alongside the main gritted roads which I was quite suprised at.

There are times though where ploughing and gritting won't do anything. My neighbour wanted to know why nothing was done on Saturday evening when it was snowing heavy. Unfortunately there's nothing that can be done in heavy snow when the temperatures are really low. The road had been salted an hour before the snow started (I followed the gritter) but the road quickly covered and the traffic ground to a halt.

The main issues I've seen is people not changing what they're doing. Driving the same speed despite snow/ice and driving to do their shopping and getting stuck in Tescos car park. We're all no less than 1 mile from Tescos so it wouldn't be hard to walk every other day and get the essentials but people don't seem prepared to change and adapt - I think that's the core issue when we have snow in the UK.

Gareth, you must be the lucky ones in Suffolk, as in my area of the county, or even just of Ipswich, very little grit is being laid! My road is constantly a death-trap, being on a steep hill, the road is currently a mixture of slush and black ice. The schools here were mostly open, they dealt with that quite quickly, although there were a few reports that staff hadn't taken coming into school all that well.

However, we do seem to be in a lucky area, as ParcelForce are making deliveries in their vans at the moment, as they've just delivered a package to Mrs No.12 around the corner!

Critique wrote:Gareth, you must be the lucky ones in Suffolk, as in my area of the county, or even just of Ipswich, very little grit is being laid! My road is constantly a death-trap, being on a steep hill, the road is currently a mixture of slush and black ice. The schools here were mostly open, they dealt with that quite quickly, although there were a few reports that staff hadn't taken coming into school all that well.

There are parts of my side of Suffolk that are bad but it is confined to roads that are not included in the gritting runs. Suffolk County Council workers were out on Sunday shovelling snow and laying grit across the town centre.

The one difference maybe that Ipswich BC are responsible for gritting on behalf of Suffolk CC within Ipswich - certainly on my side of the county it remains the county council who deal with it.

cwathen wrote:I'm afraid I don't agree here at all. The police and the council (who both receive good council tax money) do have a duty of care to try and keep the roads and the streets safe.

To put a little perspective on the matter in my example, Sheffield City Council announced the morning after the big snowfall, that it was probably the single heaviest downfall of snow the city had seen, and certainly the heaviest in 80 years. The council has a pre-set and arranged snowfall procedure, which involves gritting / clearing the routes to fire stations, police stations, hospitals and other high-priority locations first, then the main arterial routes around the city, then the minor routes, then finally side streets. From my house, I can see part of the ring road - we saw two things of note that day - constant ploughing failing to keep the road clear (due to continued snow fall), and drivers constantly failing to retain control of their vehicles at the traffic lights, with many sailing past the line because there was no grip.

The Police told everyone to stay indoors and stay warm, not to drive unless it is an emergency and that they did not consider going to work an emergency. Yet still there have been thousands of complaints that the council hadn't cleared the two foot of snow from people's driveways. An often announced view was "why do they bother trying to clear the ring road when nobody can get out of their houses?", which IMHO, is an idiotic viewpoint - what point would there be of thousands of drivers getting out of their perfectly clear roads, just to find a two foot high wall of snow where they meet the ring road.

It was not a normal or expected quantity of snow, I've not seen anything like it before (the closest was when I was a kid in the 80's, but certainly nothing like it in the last 15 years). To expect the council / police to have cleared the roads like it was the normal few flakes is completely unacceptable. Unfortunately, the council isn't allowed (or is afraid) to say "we're not digging you out for a few days, if you're in that much of a hurry, get a shovel and do it yourself".

Critique wrote:Ah, but where three or four years ago I would have agreed with you, I don't anymore. As for the past two years we've had this weather, which has had the same effect both years. It seems, what with Global Warming, we're going to see this weather on a form of a yearly occurrence now, so I do believe we need to start preparing for it.

As I've just said, in my example, we had more snow than I've seen in over 15 years fall in less than 12 hours. It's not happened in the last three or four years, and according to Sheffield City Council, not in the last 80. Expecting to cope with it, without wasting obsence quantities of money on road clearing equipment and staff who won't be used for ten years at a time, it not reasonable, and nobody will want to pay for it anyway.

We live in England. It gets cold, and it snows sometimes. Sometimes it will even be so cold and snowy as to make travel difficult. This is not a new phenomenon, why are we treating it as such?