Summary: how are these located? Are they mostly meant to protect roadways? (Doesn’t seem sensible, based on what I’ve seen.) Or what?
Background: Me and my gal just got back from a long road trip, from Southern California up through Grand Tetons, Yellowstone (first time for both of us), and Glacier National Park (didn’t quite make it to the Canada border, but close). Wonderful, simply wonderful.
Saw those things in Wyoming that must be snow fences: what else could they be? Seemed in parallel rows, but otherwise the alignment seemed mixed compared to the highway we were on. What the heck?
Me, I’m just a SoCal dude, hardly a thought in my head that hasn’t been bleached out by the sun. I’ve made acquaintance with that stuff called snow, but I can’t say we’re intimate.
In Colorado, they are placed where wind comes howling down a mountain, blowing snow onto the road. When the wind blows snow over a road, it’s hard to tell where the road ends and the shoulder begins, so it helps reduce accidents.
Where I’m from, you could reliably find the snow fences in the seedier part of town. Anyone looking to unload stolen snow knew who to ask for. The big names in the hot snow racket were Ed “Frosty” Mulligan and Julius “Christmas in July” Karnovsky. The gang wars these mugs used to wage over the prime turf for handling the white stuff were legendary. Reporters from every state in the Union (at the time, I believe, six) covered the trial of Karnovsky’s toughest enforcer, Bob “The Icepick” Smith for the murder of one of Mulligan’s henchmen, Paul “No Nickname” Doyle. The prosecutors thought they had an open-and-shut case, but couldn’t break through the Icepick’s contention that Doyle had simply lent Smith his head, wrapped in brown paper, for a few weeks, and would pick it up when he (Doyle) came back from an out-of-state fishing trip. As the jury foreman, James “Brain-dead” Moyes said later, absent contradictory testimony from Doyle, which the prosecution never presented, there was enough reasonable doubt to demand an acquittal. The presiding judge, Sharon “Graft-Vacuum” Semmler, retired shortly after the trial.
A few years later, somebody realized that there isn’t any demand for stolen snow, and the whole criminal enterprise, including the snow fences, had to close operations and get real jobs.
Oh, phooey, this is GQ. Sorry. Well, here’s an article about placement of a snow fence:
Sonetimes it doesn’t require much thought: If you notice that you chronically get a huge drift across the road at a certain point, you start putting a snow fence there. There’s a single cornfield smack in the middle of Decatur’s built-up northeast side that generates a drift across Woodford Street if the snow fence isn’t put up. So the Street Department gets out there as soon as the farmer gets his corn off, and up the fence goes.
In Milwaukee (for anyone in the area, I’m talking about the one’s along the lakefront). They also have permanent ones on some of the steep hills. Normally about 10 feet from the top of the hill they’ll have a chain link fence, and then another one about 10 feet down from that. Of course these are to prevent people from sledding down the hill. The sledders, like the snow, wind up in the street and cause accidents. We also have the normal ones near big fields. Here’s another question. For as long as I can remember I have seen them put up a cheap ugly snow fence across the street from the airport in the crash field, and then a few months later they take it down. Surely they would save plenty of money in the long run by just putting up a nice looking fence and leaving it there (ie a chain link fence). They only answer I’ve ever gotten to that question is that it makes for more jobs in the city.