The title says it all. The recent storm laid down something like a foot of snow (30 cm) in places and the newspapers make it sound like it’s a major problem. Are the gas reserves really that low? Is there a problem importing it during the winter?
It sounds like both the temperature and amount of snow are something out of the ordinary but it is farther North than the continental US.
It’s the salt / grit reserves that are low, our infrastructure isn’t geared up for events like this, and people don’t know how to drive in these conditions. Recently, we have had a long succession of very mild winters, so a whole generation of people haven’t learned how to cope.
As for climate, Britain has a maritime - rather than continental - climate, which means that the seasons are milder, and we benefit from the Gulf Stream, which warms the seas around the coasts.
I’m kinda snowed into my house at the moment. It’s not serious, but I can’t get my car out of the driveway, so have been working from home these past two days. It was -10C last night so all the snow that fell the night before, and the slush, has iced up.
Compared to many other countries it’s nothing really - I have a Canadian friend who is particularly scornful of us.
The issue here is that we’re temperate, and snow like this only happens maybe once a decade. There is little point in local authorities investing in snow plows and vast reserves of grit and salt to cope with a relatively unlikely event. Thus the grit and salt has run out in most places, so the trucks can’t operate, so the roads are frozen, as are the train lines, and the country is largely grinding to a halt.
Regarding gas reserves, we get gas from our own fields, as well as from continental Europe via pipe, and liquid gas via tanker. But it’s finite and the tanker-supplied gas isn’t coming in due to the infrastructure problems noted above. The largest user of gas is industry. A lot of factories (so the radio tells me) are on flexy supply, which means they get substantial discounts in return for an interruptible supply. Now that domestic demand has gone up so high (e.g. I’ve had the heating on permanently for 3 days now, when normally I’m at work and it’s off) that industry is being cut off occasionally.
I reckon that if one did a cost/benefit analysis, investment in such things would prove less expensive than the economy losing billions every day the bad weather continues, but since provision for this sort of thing is determined by local government, and local governments tend to be very short-termist, it’s unlikely to change in the future, unless the national government lays down the law.
There’s blizzard-like snow forecast to be coming in tomorrow and the next day, so the situation will only get worse.
Well that makes more sense. It’s total chaos when a lower state gets snow. When I looked up the Latitude I was surprised just how far North the UK was. Having lived in a snow-belt state I know what real snow looks like.
I would expect that spot gas purchases should be pretty easy given the vast amounts of it in North America. It should only be a matter of having enough reserves to cover the time needed to ship more over.
It’s a severe amount of snow relative to recent years. Got caught out myself on a long car journey down from Scotland - road became impassable and we had to get a hotel room in a village en route. We had our baby with us, quite a sobering experience.
Some of the driving you see is comical - we enjoy relatively high standards of driving by and large but once the snow is down we’re clueless. Understandable in some respects, as when would you get the practice? But there’s still basic concepts you’d think most people could grasp.
Agree some winter-related investment in infrastructure must be merited. People who have been badly delayed at Edinburgh airport in recent days have told me that it has one snow plough. Come on, now. It’s not O’Hare, but more of an effort is needed here.
I think people outside the UK often have a distorted image of British weather - just last week I was in Cape Cod (loads of snow there) talking to a waiter who had been surprised not to be greeted by a Dickensian winter scene when he landed in London one February. He couldn’t believe that not only was there no snow, but that it was pretty mild and there were flowers in Regents Park. Hollywood does us no favours here - watch any film like Bridget Jones or The Holiday and Britain will be shown dusted in piles of the white Christmassy stuff.
But the fact is, in normal winters, southern England particularly just doesn’t really get any. Maybe a day of flurries that fail to settle, but that’s about it. So more than 3 inches, and we go into full-on seizure.
Thankfully though, we have the wherewithal to warm our baboons up.
That’s universal everywhere except the heaviest of snow-belt country. The first snow should be called the “First Day of Stupid” and serve as a floating holiday.
While it is bad in some parts of the country, I don’t think it really is that bad in London. The news is making a big deal of it (even in London) because it’s a slow news day. Some London and Essex schools have closed more because everyone is happy to have a day off than because they actually need to close, and because we were all expecting it to be more like last February, when the snow really was bad enough that everything shut down.
The average temperature for London doesn’t go below zero all year. Obviously the UK gets colder the further North you go, but even Edinburgh and Oban don’t go below zero on average, so the temperatures they’re getting now are unusual. I can’t find stats about snowfall, but obviously that’s related to temperature.
At risk of sounding like a Daily Mail reader, or even worse a poster on BBCs Have Your Say, there has been the strong impression of people not needing too much excuse to declare getting to work impossible, and deciding to “work from home”. I actually had to be in the office yesterday, so set off at the normal time. The journey was an absolute breeze, 10 minutes shorter than usual, because the roads were deserted. A little bit of snow/ice on minor roads, but no huge problem. Of course if all those other people who aren’t excellent drivers like me were out on the roads, it might have been chaos. 
I did leave work early, and on the way back noticed a lot of people working from home with their kids, the dog etc. Not sure what kind of work these people do but it seems to involve building snowmen.
Forecasts say that the thaw may be a long way off, so at some point people will start returning to work whatver the conditions. I’m dreading that.
Yes, the amount of snow we’re getting is very unusual. I live just south of London and personally I haven’t seen snow settle for this long in decades - we get snow once every couple of years, but it tends to fall overnight, sit there all morning and melt in the evening. This time we’ve had snow settling for days at a time. Around here it’s pretty unheard of nowadays.
As for the problems it causes, as people have already stated, it’s not to do with heating, it’s the transport. Because we get snow so rarely no one is prepared for it: councils around here don’t think it’s worth investing lots of money in something that’s fairly unlikely to happen, so we don’t have huge teams of gritting trucks at the ready, we have hardly any snow ploughs at all (I’ve never seen one), we have relatively low stocks of grit and people here don’t have the cars, the tyres or the tyre chains to drive in even mild snowy conditions. Once the snow starts settling the roads become impassable - cars that are already on the road start skidding and getting stuck, which leads to accidents and abandoned cars respectively, jamming up the roads even more. Trees fall down, blocking roads and train tracks, and if the snow builds up too much on a train track forcing even one train stop, that instantly shuts down the entire line until the snow is cleared.
Even the Eurostar tunnel to France shut down a couple weeks back - the tunnel had never experienced such a “severe cold snap” (only about -5 degrees centigrade) and the sudden transition from the cold, dry air in northern France to the warm, moist air in the tunnel caused the Eurostar trains’ electronics to fail. It shut down the tunnel for days. Airports had the same problem with simply not having enough ploughs and gritters to keep the runways safe in heavy snow.
As a teacher who was sent home early from school in London, I have to disagree that schools are closing because people want the day off. We have a lot of staff who come in from far away, and many trains and other forms of public transport are disrupted. They’ve gritted only the most major roads, seemingly based on their interpretation of maps rather than on the actual amount of use they get since the busiest road I use on my way to work was an ice rink. I’m quite used to driving in snow, but it isn’t snow, it’s ice, and no fucker else seems to be able to work out how to drive on it. I even skidded a little myself on the way off the estate, saw a couple of accidents, and a woman slipped off the pavement right in front of my car. She’s lucky I wasn’t going too fast. Anyway, to return to my point, the pavements are also totally ungritted, the school playground isn’t gritted and has frozen too solid to clear with shovels. A lot of parents kept their children off school. That’s their decision, though it won’t do their little darlings any favours. However, with a school with perhaps 60% of students in attendance, a severely lowered staff:student ratio as well, and more snow/freezing over forecast, the head took the decision to send us all home. If one teacher can’t get to work, that’s 30 kids who aren’t being taken care of. So instead of complaining that teachers are lazy twats who can’t be arsed to get to work, and saying that we’re costing the economy billions because every parent has to take a day off to care for their own offspring (shock, horror!), maybe think about every other fucking day when we do take care of them for you, free at the point of delivery, no matter how badly you’ve brought them up. Closing a school isn’t a decision taken lightly.
There’s been a hard frost every night here since a week before Christmas (the lowest was -15C which is unusually cold). There’s been a fair amount of snow too, but the roads are not too bad. Further up in the Highlands there’s been frequent road closures, but they get that quite a lot anyway.
However, one bright spot - it looks like there might be a Grand Match for the first time since 1979
That’s not what I’m saying at all. FWIW, until this year I was a secondary school teacher myself. There’s really, really no need for you to be so defensive and start throwing around accusations of bad parenting.
Many of my friends are still teachers, don’t have far to travel, and (understandably) just want a day off, same as many of my friends who aren’t teachers. Perhaps your school is having problems, but the ones round here are barely icey at all and the public transport’s working fine.
I live in the south west, and snow is a rarity here - particularly snow that lasts. It was -7C last night, so it’s all frozen snow and ice now.
I’m really impressed that absolutely nothing seems to prevent our teenage newspaper boy from delivering our newspapers. He was here at 6.30 this morning, in the dark, in -7C, with frozen roads and pavements. Unlike our postman who I haven’t seen for two days.
I’m not accusing anyone here of bad parenting. I’m aware I said “you”, but I didn’t mean you personally, I meant generic you. Sorry that wasn’t clear. Unfortunately however it is my opinion that the average Daily Mail reader complaining that they have to spend time with their children because teachers are too lazy to go to work, is not usually a very good parent. I wouldn’t try to allege that I know anyone who wouldn’t take a free day off if someone offered it to them, but closing schools really isn’t an easy decision, and it’s not one taken by the teachers themselves anyway.
Because it’s getting so cold at night (the forcast tonight is -8C) I’m letting the cat that lives in my garage spend nights in the hall. This is a major inconvenience, but if the gas runs out at least I’ll then have no reason not to kick him out.
The main roads here (Milton Keynes) are all clear now but side roads are pretty yuk. The MK centre (mall) was very nearly shut down when I was there “working from home” yesterday afternoon, I’d say 2/3 of the shops were shut and the rest pretty empty.
I live in western Pennsylvania, where major snow storms happen every winter. People don’t know how to drive in these conditions here, either.
It was -12C here last night in the North West, and apparently -20C in the Scottish Highlands. We’ve had nearly a foot of snow in the last few days (it actually all fell in one day), with more on the way, and the snow from before Christmas hadn’t fully cleared, due to the temperature never edging above zero for weeks.
I have to drive back to Edinburgh for Monday, a journey I’m not really looking forward to: the road through Biggar isn’t a very nice drive at the best of times, and apparently it was shut completely yesterday, with even the M8 between Glasgow and Edinburgh being brought to a standstill at times, or so I’m told.
Doctor Who films in Cardiff. It must be cold most of the time. I’ve noticed that you can almost always see a little frozen breath in any outdoor scenes. The actors are dressed in normal clothes. No coats or anything. It’s like they don’t want to admit it’s cold.
I’ve seen behind the scenes footage of the actors bundled up in heavy coats. They pull them off right before filming a scene. I feel bad for the ladies in dresses.