??? Windshields blown in and destroyed by snow? Do we have links on these bizarre happenings? I’ve lived in Alaska for 37 years and I’ve never heard of such a thing. Not even from the tops of semis, and I don’t know about your state, but we don’t have any semi topper snow cleaning racks or anything like that up here.
And yes, I do clean my truck’s windows and windshield. I’ve been driving in Anchorage since I was 16 and I’ll be 48 in April. Very rarely has anyone’s snow clump landed on my windshield (mostly from the aforementioned semis), and like I said, I’ve yet to see or hear of one smash in someone’s window.
It was a couple of days ago and I don’t have a link for it, but yes, as part of the media’s coverage of our recent storm’s aftermath I saw TV footage of a car whose windshield had been smashed by snow/ice flying off another vehicle. The driver wasn’t hurt but was still shaking when interviewed.
IIRC we do have such a law against “peephole driving”. I once saw a cop get out of his car and go to the car behind him and clean it off. It was so bad, the driver just had this tiny round hole in the driver’s side windshield. People do that all of the time. IMHO, that’s far more dangerous than a puff of snow blowing off onto your car, they can’t see anything but what is directly in front of them.
The ditzy looking young lady inside (we could see her once the windows were cleared) at least had the grace to look embarrassed.
Any more anti-snow-removal posters that bring up the term “following distance” will be shot. If the many points made about Flying, drifting, unpredictable sheets of ice have not pierced your thick snow covered skulls, then perhaps you need to meet the business end of my ice-scrapper. Or maybe its just that you dimwitted fucktwats have not bothered to read the entire thread before posting your asinine, incorrect assumptions about defensive driving. Regardless, my opinions of Uvula Donor, mks57 and Fear Itself have just been flushed with the huge peice of shit that I just squeezed out my ass.
DAMN!!! Sorry, I’m glad you took my post in the spirit in which is was meant, shock, not sarcasm.
But how do you get off 4 inches of glued on ice from the top of a huge truck? While we don’t get ice storms, I know that the semis have a winter’s buildup that must, through thaws and freezes, get thick enough to cause an ice cake.
We use brooms or telescoping scrapers to get the snow off, but we occasionally get freezing rain that causes that 1/8 inch thick epoxied on ice layer, I can’t imagine getting that off of an entire car. Someone earlier mentioned a saturn-shaped ice chunk flying off.
I guess you just stay home until the car thaws out? Come to think of it, how do you get into the car when it’s caked with ice like that?
(<-----glad she lives in nice moderate Anchorage).
Sometimes the ditzes pay with their lives. It was, I believe, two or three years ago that a young woman (high school senior?) in this area was killed in a car crash because she hadn’t bothered to clean more than a half-hearted peephole in the snow and ice on her windshield before driving her car.
Don’t even try to pass off that crap about following to close. Every dumb ass that causes problems on the road pulls that rabbit out of the hat. The ice hits you following at a normaly safe distance for the road conditions in winter. The other drivers are not responsible for making your car safe for other vehicles on the road, that’s your burden, and the law in some states. Those chunks go spinning and bouncing for a long distance on the road, and their heavy enough to cause a lot of damage and injury. I saw a semi with a trailer of junk cars stuck under a bridge. Two flattened cars were on the interstate that had flown off the load. Had anybody been following the normal safe distance behind they would have been crushed. I can imagine the first phrase I hear coming out of some dumb ass “They were following to close.” “They should have driven further back knowing the truck could loose a few vehicles.”
“In excess of 15 incidents have been reported where snow and ice released from cars and trucks while driving ultimately damaged other vehicles on the roadway,” said police spokesman Cpl. Jeff Whitmarsh.
You drive the car on local roads (the ones wit lower speeds), for a bit until the heat loosens the ice on top. Then you whack it with the edges of the broom until it breaks into chunks and you can knock it off.
While it would be tedious in the extreme for a tractor-trailer, my best suggestion if it really is solid ice glued to your car would be boiling water. It would, admittedly, take a while for an SUV, but I know several people who use that method even for stuff that I would just knock off with a scraper.
Actually, this also happened to a coworker of mine on his way to the office on Wednesday. Want to see what happens when a driver doesn’t bother to clean the ice off of his truck? My friend took a picture. He’s okay, by the way.
Wow, yeh – the car I saw in the TV news report had the same kind of damage, though in that case the impact had been more to the center rather than directly in front of the driver. Not totally shattered but smooshed in like that. Thank Og auto windshield glass is specially made to crumble rather than shatter into thousands of razor-sharp flying shards, huh?
As for the loose snow problem - I have seen for myself (thankfully as a pedestrian and as a driver from a safe vantage point, not yet as the poor bastard in the following vehicle, knock wood) just how unpredictable that can be. One second there’s just a tiny trail and visibility is fine at the standard safe following distance. Next thing you know, the car speeds up, or there’s a favorable gust of wind, or for all I know the planets reach the correct alignment, and BAM! - a trail of fine ice crystals that would make Halley’s comet jealous.
Fortunately we have civilized laws about winter driving here, which include clearing loose snow off the entire vehicle and clearing your whole windshield and rear window, plus the two front side windows. Alas, no public crucifixions for violators, but the fines aren’t exactly a whole lot of fun.
Its real fun being hit by these chunks when you are on a bike, as if the slushy streets & splashing weren’t hard enough to deal with, now I have to deal with Speed Racer and his snow chunk gun. And for the record, Fear Itself, they were passing me.
Thankfully I’ve only been hit in the torse and arm. Where my ‘armor’ is thickest. But if ones of these things hits my head…
I’ve never owned an SUV, so I never had all that much of a problem sweeping the snow off the roof. I will confess, however, that I’d occasionally leave some snow on the roof of the car because I kind of enjoyed the Halley’s Comet effect. Never left packed ice, though.
Before y’all nail me up on that roadside cross, I now live in southeast Texas; I’ve had my Pennsylvania-grade ice scraper out once in the past three years.
