Some snow questions

Factual Questions
1

Since most of the country’s frozen, I thought I’d ask some snow questions that have always been bugging me

  1. How long can you stay in a car in a blizzard before freezing? Let’s say you’re driving alone and your car dies in the middle of a blizzard (I’m actually fairly concerned about this as I’ve never driven through snow before). I’ve always wondered if I should make a break for it or wait it out. In TV and movies, they always try to get help (probably because it’s better TV than just sitting in a car). But to me, if I have shelter and relative comfort, I think I’d be stupid to leave the car. As long as I drink snow to keep hydrated, couldn’t I survive for days inside? My body heat’s gotta warm up the car some right?

  2. How do snow days work? I mean, do you call in sick to work or do some workplaces with frequent snow actually have snow day designations on your time cards? I read in another thread that some employers expect you to make up the time or take it off as sick. What if I brave the snow and come in even though nobody else is at work? Can I get credit for that or does it not count because nobody else is there? It’s not my fault nobody else wanted to wade through the snow

  3. Do you guys really have to get up hours before you have to go to work to shovel out the driveway? What if you just get up at a normal time and back out of the snow? Can’t that work?

  4. Is it hard to make a human-sized snowman? Can you really just roll a snowball around in the snow and it gets bigger and bigger? I mean, snow pieces don’t fall off of it, it just keep building? And can you roll a snowball down a hill and watch as it gets huge or will you still end up with a small snowball at the bottom of the hill?

  5. If you get hit in the face with a snowball, does it hurt like a rock hit you or does it break apart fairly easily and is soft?

  6. I’ve seen pictures of people playing out in the snow with their dogs. Dogs don’t get that cold in the snow? I would be afraid of letting it outside naked like that

  7. Do people still get out and exchange insurance info for little fender benders when everyone’s cars are slipping in the snow? I watched these videos of dozens of cars just sliding into each other but it doesn’t seem like anyone got out to exchange insurance info. They acted like it was normal and it happens, so why bother?

2
  1. If your car dies, you’ll be cooler than if you’re stuck with a running engine and a full tank of gas. Of course, then you have to worry about exhaust gasses getting in the car. If you are prepared, you can keep warm enough. Look at the igloo. It has to stay cold enough not to melt; but it’s significantly warmer than outside. If you’re prepared (for example, you have a Winter-weight sleeping bag in the car) you only have to keep the air around you warm; not the whole inside of the car.

There are two problems with melting snow: First, how do you melt it? You’ve got your trusty Svea 123, right? But do you really want to use it inside an enclosed space? Second, snow has more volume than water, so you’ll have to be gathering a lot of it. Eating snow is a bad idea. You don’t want to use your body’s energy warming up snow. You want your body to keep itself warm.

  1. I’ve had a few snow days, but I telecommute regularly so I just ‘go to work’ from my couch. We’ve been sent home early from the office for snow and for street-clogging marches, and we got paid for full days. I assume that businesses have plans in place, but it will vary by business.

  2. It doesn’t snow so much here that I need to shovel the driveway. Besides, the Prius doesn’t like snow. So I just jump in the Jeep.

  3. I haven’t made a full-sized snowman since I was a teen. Easy enough making the balls, but they are heavy. Rolling the balls around have created satisfactorily-large balls.

  4. Stings a bit, because you have cold, sharp crystals hitting your cold skin. You can make hard snowballs if you’re evil.

  5. Dogs have fur to insulate them. Sled dogs often stay outside in the weather.

  6. Most of the videos I’ve seen are shown during the sliding or just after. I’m sure information is exchanged as soon as feasible.

3
  1. Addendum: In case of a snow-covered Jeep, I like an extra 15 minutes. First, I clear the snow off of the driver’s side door. I get in, start the engine, and turn the defroster on high. Then I get out and use a push-broom to remove as much snow as I can – including from the roof. I don’t like it when people don’t clean the tops of their cars and it blows off on the freeway, so I clean it off so I won’t be ‘that guy’. Also, it saves a little gas. If it’s a wet snow, there will often be ice on the glass. Scraping the ice takes a little time. By the time I get the snow and ice off the Jeep, the inside is tolerably warm.
4

Posting from Saskatchewan, where snow and cold temperatures are a fact of life for about five months of the year:

  1. Always stay in your car, for several reasons:

(a) Windchill can kill, by triggering hypothermia.

(b) In a blizzard, it’s extremely easy to get disoriented and get lost, leading to hypothermia. See (a) above.

© If police are notified that you’re lost, it’s a lot easier for them to find a car, even one partially buried in snow, than it is to find a human wandering and lost.

(d) You can stay in a car for a long time and avoid freezing, provided you’re well equipped with warm clothing and a blanket. If you’re stuck but the engine works, you can survive by starting it every hour or so to get some heat, then shutting it down - can last several hours that way. You should also have a couple of candles (the big fat kinds, not tapers) to generate heat if you can’t start the car. You should also have a pan and candles to melt the snow - eating snow is not recommended, because the amount of heat that the body uses to melt the snow in your mouth can be significant.

  1. Snow days are extremely rare here. I’ve never had an employer shut down just because of snow. It normally takes an extreme blizzard, where the employer might advise employees that they can go home if they wish, especially if they live outside the city and have to travel on the highways. But even in those cases, I don’t recall my employers ever actually closing. This is likely a YMMV thing, depending on how familiar your region is with heavy snow.

  2. Depends on how heavy the snowfall is, and how good your vehicle is in snow. If there’s been a heavy snowfall, doing that in my car would likely get the car stuck. In a four-by-four, maybe not. That’s why a lot of people have four-by-fours up here.

  3. Depends on the temperature. The snow has to be close to melting point to be sticky enough to form a ball. Up here, we normally only see snowmen towards the end of the winter, as the melt starts in. When the temperature is around -20 C, like it is today for us, you can’t make a snowman. If the snow is sticky enough, the size depends on your time and how much snow is around. The bit about a snow ball rolling down hill and getting huge is just poetic licence.

  4. Hurts like hell.

  5. Dogs aren’t naked. They’ve got fur. How long a particular dog can stay out depends on if they’re short-haired or long-haired, and how cold it is. My little dachshund loved playing in the snow, but would have to come in fairly quickly if the temperature was low. Long-haired dogs like collies and retrievers can stay out a lot longer. Farm dogs often aren’t allowed into the house around here - they have a dog-house or access to a shed or barn.

  6. I’ve always stopped (not that it’s happened to me very often - I tend to slow down in snow).

5

Remember that if you’re running your car once in a while to stay warm that you need to check peroiodically and ensure the exhaust pipe is clear.

6

Remember the sad story of that guy from CNet and his family who got stuck in their car on a road way out in the back of beyond. He eventually went for help, she stayed with the kids. It got pretty bad in the car - she breastfed the kids and they burned tires, but they survived. He didn’t. Stay in your car. Somebody will probably eventually find you.

7

Upper Peninsula of Michigan here. We get 200-300 inches of snow a year, so I figure I’m qualified to answer.

1 - stay in your car, unless you’re familiar with the area and know there’s civilization within walking distance. Or, better yet, don’t drive in blizzards. You usually know when they’re coming; stay home. If you’re forced to go out, have gear in the car in case you do get stuck (blanket & water, a shovel and sand or cat litter to help get out of a snow bank, etc.)

2 - What Northern Piper said. The only places that I know of that have official snow days are the schools & universities - they’ll announce on the radio, TV, and the web in the morning if they’re closed, and if you work there, you get a snow day. I’m pretty sure you get paid for these. Normal businesses pretty much just assume that you know you live in a snowy area and you’ll get to work or work from home if it snows.

Snow days are actually more common in places where it doesn’t snow much, because those places don’t have the equipment to clear the streets when it snows. Around here, it’s very, very rare that you can’t get around town ever. The snow plows go almost constantly when it’s snowing hard. If you can get out of your driveway, you can drive. It might be slippery and you might have to go slow, but you can do it if you want.

3 - What Northern Piper said. And keep in mind that 4x4s also get stuck if the snow is heavy enough. We personally pay a guy to come and plow our driveway with a truck & blade, because we have a really long driveway. Most people have snowblowers, and yes, they get up early and snowblow their driveways before going to work.

You don’t want to just drive over the snow on a regular basis and never clear it; you’ll get big ruts and it’ll eventually become impossible to get through.

On a side note - clearing snow over the winter is not just as simple as “get it off the driveway.” You have to plan ahead, because the stuff doesn’t go away for months. We’ve had a few years that we came close to having to get a front-end loader in to clear away some of the snow piles because it was getting to the point where we had no more room to put the stuff.

If you live in the city, it’s illegal to dump the snow on the street or sidewalk, and it’s also illegal to put it in your neighbor’s yard.

4 - Not all snow is “snowman snow.” If it’s too cold, the snow doesn’t stick together. Being able to build a human size snowman is easy enough if it’s the right conditions, but at least around here, it’s usually too cold to get the snow to stick together.

5 - Once again, it depends on the snow & how well it packs. Some snowballs are light & fluffy and don’t hurt at all. Some are thick & dense and hurt a lot. Sometimes your brothers put ice chunks in them and throw them at you and it REALLY hurts but then you can run inside and tell Mom and they get in trouble. :smiley:

6 - Depends on the dog. My pugs are not snow dogs, they have short coats and get cold pretty quickly. I’ve had other dogs that slept outside down to zero degrees. Most dogs seem to do fine and really like the snow. I just got back from cross country skiing, and the trail network I was on allowed dogs (not all do), and there were lots of friendly happy doggies happily running along while their owners skied.

7 - Dunno. I think I’d get out and exchange info, but it’s never happened to me. Like I said above, they know how to maintain the roads here during the snow, and people know how to drive on snow. Fender-benders happen, but they’re not super common. It’s places that don’t get snow that have lots of snow-related fender benders.

Overall, it’s not really all that crazy to live in a snowy place once you get used to it. I grew up here, and I missed it like crazy when I lived where we didn’t get much snow. It’s very pretty, and there’s lots of stuff (skiing, snowshoeing, etc) that you can do in the snow. I like it here; I have no desire to move because of the weather.

8

Carry a cell phone, even if the rescue people cannot get to you right away, they can triagulate your signal for your location. If your in North America, any cellphone will work regardless of contract or time remaining , as the 911 feature is paid by other users.

You make a personal decision regarding your ability to drive in inclement weather, either you make it in, late or on time depending on when you left or you call in. Your employer will have documentation regarding your getting paid or not getting paid. Its one of those your milage will vary things.

Most folks that live in the snow belt will have snow blowers , at least us in the burbs do so hours is a bit much. If we leave at normal time , you are on the tail end of rush our as everyone is leaving several hours early to make it into work, you learn to pay attention to the weather channel and adjust your life accordingly.

Your supposed to go to a collision reporting center, at least here in Ontario for damage under a certain amount. I havent been in a winter bender yet , thank you so I dont exactly know what the procedure is.

YMWV

Declan

9

If you’re stuck in a blizzard in your car, keeping the exhaust clear is NOT trivial. You’re more likely to die of carbon monoxide poisoning in there than of hypothermia if you don’t make sure the exhaust isn’t venting into the car.

10

Never mind rolling snow balls down hills, I stumbled upon an article about self-rolling snow balls.

11

And then there are the moving rocks of Death Valley.

12

My mom and dad saw some of these in WV, in one of the rare places with flat, open land.

13

  1. From what I have seen if the company decides to close because of the weather everyone who is sent home is paid and it is the companies loss. If they are open and you stay home you have to use sick time or whatever. Of course this may vary at different employers.

  2. Depends on the size of your driveway and the amount of snow. You need an extra 10 minutes or more to clear the snow off your car so you can see no matter what you drive. When the plow goes down the street it leaves a pile of snow at the end of your driveway. If you get stuck on top of it you make way more work for yourself because you have to get the snow out from under the car to move it. Usually I just knock the pile down low enough so I know I can plow through it.

14

  1. It totally depends on the type of snow and how hard you pack it. If you hold the snowball in your hands for a few minutes it turns into a ball of ice and feels like it when it hits.

  2. Those videos are extreme cases and I imagine at some point the people exchange information. People trading insurance info doesn’t make for exciting video :slight_smile: If you get in an accident you still have to trade info and attempt to figure out who is at fault. Most drivers in the north go years without accidents, it’s not like our cars are all beat to hell and no one cares.

15
  1. In 34 year working in the Iron Mining Industry we never had a snow day. There were an occasional day where one would be allowed to leave early and only b y contract, get paid for the hours worked or reporting pay was the only contractual obligation the Company gave wich meant one would get 2 hours pay for showing up and there was no work for them and therefore could go home or maybe pick up a broom.
    3.And just as soon as you get the drive shoveled out the snow plow comes by again and rolls a nice new berm so you can start all over again:mad::mad:

We here in Minnesota shake our head at the big deal made of a little snow.:wink:

En route to Colorado one year for Elk hunting we hit a decent blizzard west of Cheyenne Wyoming on I-80. We were the 1st to pull off and take shelter under an overpass to wait out the storm. The DOT opened up a path back to Cheyenne and directed everyone (about 40 units) to return to Cheyenne as the pass was closed to Laramie I told them we would wait at the spot and they said NO, Well when we were ordered out I took the trail through the median and headed west instead. I was expecting a welcoming squad at the freeway gates in Laramie, but nothing happened. It was quite a sight to see the change in weather on the west side of the pass and all the cars and trucks lined up behind the gates. That was the only time I have ever seen gates closed on the freeway. There are no gates in Northern Minnesota.

16

That’s because there are few blizzards in Northern Minnesota. Heavy snow does not make a blizzard. A blizzard is heavy snow and 30mph+ winds over a period of time greater than three hours. Roads ice up and visibility can approach zero. I’ve seen video of stationary cars being blown across a flat road by the wind. In the plains states, there are no trees to block blowing snow, so even if it is not snowing, blizzard conditions can exist.

Every couple of years you’ll hear a story of someone in Kansas or the Dakotas being found in their car a week after a blizzard. Sometimes they’re alive, sometimes not. Those gates exist not because people are wusses about driving in the snow, they exist because a real live blizzard is deadly.

17

I absolutely agree, remember, we were the 1st to pull off the road in that blizzard, and we were also prepared for the conditions. Had tire chains along and used them when it was appropriate. There were many on that freeway that had never driven in snow and we were all treated just alike. I know I would have done the same if I worked for the DOT, and I expected to get that welcoming squad but didn’t:dubious:

18

In places where it snows frequently, you are generally expected to be able to deal with it, and get to work. It is only when you have some exceptional event that things shut down. The only time I have ever had work shut down due to snow back when I lived in upstate new york, the Emergency Broadcast System was warning people to get food and water and prepare for six feet of snow in the next 24 hours (and we got it too). Fallout from some fizzled hurricane off the coast as I recall. It was illegal for people to be out on the roads, so naturally employers couldn’t really blame you for not showing up, and it just sort of was granted off. People were busy shovelling their roofs to prevent them from collapsing, and then literally unburrying their cars.

Schools have a quota of pre-planned days that may be missed, and have to make them up at the end of the year if they miss more than the quota.

This is what children are for. One of their chores is often to shovel the driveway before dad gets home from work. In the morning you only need to punch a hole in the pile that the street plow has pushed into your driveway overnight (yeah, it’s illegal for you to shovel snow into the street, but not for them to plow snow into your driveway).

punching through with your car works in a pinch, but long term you’re just packing the snow down into ice at the end of your driveway - and that is even harder to chip off when the inevitable comes.

19

My family endured the winter of 2000-2001 in St. John’s, Newfoundland - 648.4 cm - over 21 feet of snow, “the highest all time snowfall of major Canadian cities”.

  1. How long can you stay in a car in a blizzard before freezing?
  • Well answered above. Stay with the car. Pack the car with emergency gear. Drive safe.
  1. How do snow days work?

They announce on the radio that things are closed. Usually they are penciled into the school schedule when it is drawn up. Most normal jobs - like a university, say - you just don’t go to work, and you don’t make it up - nobody is shopping, nobody is going to work, it just an involuntary holiday. Hospitals are an exception - I snowshoed to work once.

  1. Do you guys really have to get up hours before you have to go to work to shovel out the driveway? What if you just get up at a normal time and back out of the snow? Can’t that work?

2 problems with this: 1) if there is 8 inches of snow down, you need to get it off the driveway before the next 8 inches arrive, and the 8 inches after that. Our yard was about eight feet deep, and the driveway would have been to, if we* hadn’t shoveled. 2) the plow driver has left a 2 foot bank of hard packed snow at the end of the driveway. You’re not getting over that in a Hyundai, you’re just gonna get stuck. May as well shovel it before the plow man comes back and puts in another layer. Bastard.

  1. Is it hard to make a human-sized snowman?

Good snowman snow is rare. Bits fall off as other bits are going on. Most real snowmen are about 3 to 4 feet tall. Calvin and Hobbes style snowmen are therefore uncommon.

  1. If you get hit in the face with a snowball, does it hurt like a rock hit you or does it break apart fairly easily and is soft?

Depends on the snow. It’s usually shockingly cold and goes down your neck at least, but it is usually a fairly hard - at minimum it is somewhere between a nerf ball and a tennis ball. At worse, it is between a tennis ball and a frozen soft ball.

  1. I’ve seen pictures of people playing out in the snow with their dogs. Dogs don’t get that cold in the snow? I would be afraid of letting it outside naked like that.

They do get cold. The thing they really hate is the frozen balls of ice on their paw fur.

  1. Do people still get out and exchange insurance info for little fender benders when everyone’s cars are slipping in the snow?

Yup. When it’s safe, and after they’ve crawled to the sidewalk.

  • [del]Ms. Attack did most of the shoveling. Almost all. [/del] Okay, all.
20

OK, I’m going to answer some of the questions from the POV of someone living in a place where snow is rare but does happen occasionally. That changes our responses to snow. I have no idea about the car questions because I don’t drive.

In the UK, usually it would be written into your contract in some way - the contract might not specifically mention ‘snow’ but some clause or other would cover it. Unless you’re a temp on a really shitty contract you will get paid if the whole business is closed. For example, last year I was a supply teacher of sorts - employed by an agency and technically a temporary worker but I had my own classes and was treated like a ‘real’ teacher - and I was paid when the school closed. After all, I was available for work and had scheduled that work into the day rather than scheduling other work.

If the school had remained open but I couldn’t get in then I wouldn’t have been paid per contract but would almost definitely have been paid as long as it was clear I really couldn’t get in, because I was a good worker otherwise and keeping me happy was worth a day’s pay.

One of the things that makes really big snowmen hard is that, once you have a decent sized ball for the body, it starts to freeze and that makes it more difficult for extra snow to stick on it. Snow is ‘grainy’ and sticks to things. Ice makes things slip off. Snow turns to ice pretty quickly when it’s exposed to sub zero air.

(An aside to this: one of the reasons that the UK is finding it hard to cope with the snow is precisely because the snow hasn’t been constantly falling. From personal experience I’d say that trudging through knee-deep snow is much safer than sliding across a pavement that had an inch of snow which then turned to ice without a soft, insulating covering of snow above it).

Another problem is that your hands get bloody cold even with gloves on. Better gloves help, of course, but even they have their limits. A team of people building a snowman has more chance of making a human-sized creature than an individual does.

If the face freezes solid that makes it harder to stick in a carrot for the nose, too. :frowning:

Those snowball fights that you see in movies, where people are speedily tossing snowballs at each other amidst mounds of just-fallen snow - those snowballs won’t hurt unless you’re very unlucky and get one right in the eye. They are soft and do break apart easily.

You can make those soft snowballs painful by compressing them in your hand until they’re more like an ice ball. That takes a little time, however, and you’ll be pelted while you’re compressing, unless you’re hidden well. It’s bad sportsmanship anyway.

Occasionally snowballs will - unintentionally or not - have rocks inside them. They hurt.

Depends on the amount of fur, the amount of snow, how long the dog’s legs are and how accustomed the dog is to snow. Friends of mine who have dogs have posted pictures and videos of their mutts gamboling about, snouts down, amazed at this white snuffly stuff. The cats tend to hate it. Other friends have posted videos of their cats treading very carefully in fresh human footprints to get to the one snow-free area in the garden.