Next ice-age has reached Seattle - film at eleven
Wow, it's either been a really slow news week, or the local TV/Radio news reporters don't understand the gravity of the recent snow situation. Coverage over the past couple days has been a bit extreme at best. Case in point? The news reports a couple mornings ago were warning people to not leave the house unless they had to. Seriously - it's not like a blizzard came through and you'd die just by walking out of your front door. Roads were passable if you drove at a reasonable pace - OK, it helped a lot as well if your route didn't include steep un-sanded hills.
It seems like that's been the real problem - it's not that we've had such a tremendous amount of snow and ice that roads should be impassable, it's that the roads haven't seen enough sand, salt, de-icer, snow-plows, etc. Now, the question is which is more fiscally responsible? Allowing for one-off losses of productivity and repair work (downed lines, crashed cars, etc.) or paying for a proper fleet of plows and sand trucks? Probably we're better off just succumbing to mass hysteria every few years.
Side note - we did finally break the all-time record for precipitation in one month during this wintery wintery blast.