Wow, I had no idea. It’s been a decade or two since I was driving 99 and 5. What changed it?
It seemed noticeably worse than the endemic, marine-layer fog along the Central Coast where I grew up. Glad it’s gone. That stuff is dangerous on the roads.
Neat, while walking around though. I had a few moments where, with the fog pooling around my legs, it was like having my own rock and roll show on stage .
However, researchers at UC Berkeley have discovered that pollution decline is the main cause in the Tule fog decline. To get fog, you need three things: water vapor, cooling temperatures and condensation nuclei. A condensation nuclei is a speck of dust, or a pollution particle or some physical object for the water to condense onto when it gets cold.
Isn’t that also what happened to what used to be famous London fogs? – yup. In that case the pollution was primarily from burning coal.
(article also discusses the history of the problem; the case in its first paragraph was the worst, but far from the only, such smog.)
The London pea-soup wasn’t just fog triggered by pollution – it was actual thick yellow smoke made more opaque by fog. Anyway –
“… caused by a combination of industrial pollution and …”
– like f it was: coal burning for heating was the major cause. What I don’t see mentioned in that article is the contributing cause that smoke was heavy precisely because the cold front had everybody turning up the heat in their building and stoking their fires at home.
Without the anticyclone with its associated temperature inversion the smoke/pollution wouldn’t have been trapped at ground level. Remove either factor and you don’t have a problem.
Yeah, just odd to see ‘industrial’ pollution fingered as the contributing cause, as if American readers can’t conceive of smoke pollution coming from homes and offices. I think that for centuries, London probably had the worst problem specifically with residential smoke of any international city – they started early with coal and took a lot longer to move away from open fires. A lot of industry had already moved out of London, industrial boilers are more coal-efficient, and the iconic Battersea Power Station was using sulphur scrubbers long before the great smog.
Oh I see. You were taking issue with industrial vs home pollution. Fair enough.
Just to clarify, Austin had an ice storm last week and the temperature has not risen above freezing since. Trees are breaking, everything is covered with ice, and the streets are not safe at all. Last night we got about 4 inches of snow on top of the ice and our current temp is 7. This is Freaking Texas. We are not NOT prepared for this in any way. It has not been in single digits, I am told, for about 40 years. So maybe it really is “too cold” in Austin right now.
You know how you prepare? You buy a couple of extra cans/frozen containers of food that you keep in the back of your cabinet/freezer and YOU STAY THE FUCK HOME! And that goes for businesses reducing all but critical travel.
Gee - there is a chance the roads might be icy, and my gov’t does a lousy job of plowing/icing. What do I do? Do I avoid all travel that is not absolutely necessary for a day or 2? Of do I just plow along at or above the speed limit for any chore or whim however trivial?
It would be interesting to hear the reasons why the drivers of those 130 cars were on the road, and why their travel could not have waited even a few hours.
But of course - TEXAS! Where we wanna do whatever we wanna do whenever and however we wanna do it!
None of that otherwise sound advice addresses inadequate construction and infrastructure for this kind of weather, Dinsdale. Which is the real problem. Pipes aren’t built for long periods of below-freezing weather. Heating, both residential and commercial, isn’t set up for it. Boilers are things on ships. Furnaces are in factories. Not in your house. Road maintenance personnel aren’t equipped with the armies of plows, deicing, and sanding that they are up further North. And so on.
As for travelling, around most of Texas, south of Waco: yeah, stay home if you can the three days every couple of years it ices. DFW gets it a little more often. “Stay home!,” gets more challenging when it’s a week or two a year. (Whatever DFW actually gets as far as ice. I do know that I wasn’t surprised to see snow or ice visiting relatives there around Xmas. Nothing like Tahoe in Winter, but not absent either.)
The vast majority of the expanse of highway miles around Fort Worth were fine. It’s just that little area that didn’t get deiced adequately, and there was no place to go once you figured out you were in black ice conditions. Plus, people not paying attention, and driving without due care. But that’s hardly unique to Fort Worth. Unfortunately.
@running_coach, thanks for the info on tule fog. I would never have guessed they got the farms to knock particulate pollution down.
Thanks for clarifying the issues for other posters, @Gray_Ghost. I don’t understand all the extreme hostility toward Texas. It’s like California, a big big state with a real variety of areas that are nothing alike. I lived in LA for years and there’s a whole bunch of California that has nothing in common with LA. Now I live in Austin, and there’s a whole bunch of Texas with nothing in common with Austin. And in fact about half of the Austin population moved here from California! So saying things like all of Texas does “whatever we wanna whenever we wanna” is pretty meaningless.
I think another factor is that people in Texas drive very fast. I’ve driven through towns that have 55mph speed limits. The speed limit on the major highways is 75mph or higher. And everyone speeds; there are people who routinely drive above 90 mph.
So when they see road conditions are poor and decide to drive appropriately, they’re talking about slowing down to somewhere around 65 mph.
Texas cruise control: A large rock on the accelerator.
It’s a big state. West Texas? Sure, I’ve cruised at 105 before. The car was fine with it, the road was boringly straight, and you could see forever. And it was empty. I’ve also driven the same when I was on the 3 Autobahn in Germany. (Though I very rarely went away from the right lane, as 160-170 kph isn’t all that fast, there.)
In town? The speed limits are often 60; not because the roads only can support that, but because of EPA whining about air pollution. The roads spacing and sight lines (though not roadway conditions or signage) were as good or better than that unlimited stretch on the autobahn. I usually go about 70-75. When I infrequently can, because traffic is usually congested enough to make that a pipe dream. The city where I found the fastest traffic wasn’t anywhere in Texas. It was 210 and 101 in SoCal, or 95 leaving Boston. YMMV.
There are some—IMHO—too fast speed limits for some of the country roads in Texas. US Highways, but lacking controlled access and adequate sight lines to justify, for me, a 70 MPH speed limit. US 75, which parallels I-45 in parts, from Houston to Dallas, is a good example. So I go slower. And I try my hardest to move over to let people pass. Moving partially into the ‘breakdown lane’ with your right turn signal going, is a common behavior to let traffic know they can use the rest of the lane to pass. No biggie. (And it beats them doing it on your right.) But I understand why the locals like it: it’s a big state.
That’s kind of what I said in my first sentence. Weather effects different areas differently. I said nothing bad about Texas. I still say, however, driver error was the main problem with the pile up because many cars stopped just fine or with minimal damage while several just zoomed right in at full speed. That’s why I asked earlier if anyone is ever charged with anything in crashes like this. The semi driver that crushed the trailer and a car and flipped the pickup should be charged with something and certainly have his CDL yanked.
Yeah, I was able to get around Ft. Worth fine a couple of hours later that morning, and I didn’t even take the AWD car. Instead, I took a RWD sports car because I didn’t want to switch them around in the driveway, and the roads appeared completely passable in it.
The bridges/overpasses I hit that morning were obviously treated, and it was just getting to the point where the drizzle could coat patches of non-elevated roadway, which they don’t normally treat unless they are expecting a very bad ice storm. But it was very patchy. My driveway is about 5 miles from this stretch of freeway. My car was barely glazed, and I could walk without fear on the driveway’s steep incline because it was basically dry. It simply hadn’t gotten enough moisture to coat it and freeze before it sublimated or evaporated way. A couple of miles away at the intersection of Altamesa and Chisholm Trail Parkway, there was enough precipitation to actually coat the ground-level road leading up to it, and I had to be careful on the grade up to the overpass. The treated overpass was fine though, and merely slushy.
@mordecaiB , there probably will be a criminal investigation into this incident. I know I’ve been told in a defensive driving course that the DPS has to investigate any fatality accident in the state of Texas, but I can’t find a cite online for that.
Is the investigation over? Do they know for sure what happened and who all are being held responsible? I haven’t been following the story. Has the driver been charged with anything yet?
The speed limit on some roads in Texas is 85, so they’re not that far outside of legal. I’ve (literally) seen an ambulance in the far left lane running lights and sirens – with cars behind them honking and flashing at them to move over. Even an ambulance running code can’t keep up with left lane traffic around here.
I was driving on the I-10 between Katy and Columbus one day and I saw a car that had been pulled over by the police. And I was honestly wondering how fast you had to be driving on that stretch of highway for the police to pull you over. I figure over a hundred.
Continue just west of Columbus, (or take 71 in Columbus like you’re headed to Austin) and you might be surprised. Fayette County loves them some speed enforcement. (Really. Watch out near LaGrange.)
It’s been so long since COVID that I’ve driven it, but IIRC once you got out past Austin County you could get up to 80-85 or so, with a 75 speed limit, and not have too many worries. Minding work zones, of course.
I frequently got passed. Fine. People often go faster. It’s a big state. And you can always gas up at Buc-ee’s