A Weather Newsgasm

By Alan Caruba

What major weather events and especially earthquakes tell us is that we live on planet Earth on its terms, not ours. Put another way, we don’t “control” the weather or climate and, despite decades of global warming lies, compared to the sun and oceans, we don’t even influence it.

The best definition of the weather is “chaos.” It will do whatever it wants to do.

By Friday on Fox News and other television news outlets, it was non-stop coverage of Hurricane Irene even though it was barely beginning to touch the North Carolina coast. If there is one thing the news media loves it is a really big potential disaster.

By Saturday afternoon as Irene passed over North Carolina, Anthony Watts, a veteran meteorologist and commentator on WattsUpWithThat.com, was reporting, “What we have here at this point appears to be a tropical storm. By the time it reaches New York, it may very well just be a tropical depression on par with a Nor’easter in intensity.” But not a hurricane.

At one point late Saturday, I clicked the remote on every local channel and on every cable news channel. Every single one was reporting on the hurricane. According to my blogger pal, Texas Fred, that’s a “newsgasm”.

By Sunday morning, the drenching rain, but no high winds, was already moving north out of New York City and northern New Jersey where I live.

The incessant “news” coverage reflects the way television (and print) news professionals tend to regard viewers as too stupid to make decisions as basic as preparing for the hurricane or evacuating before its arrival, nor do they just report the news, i.e., the facts. So far as Irene was concerned, they engaged in massive speculation and endless predictions.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) became an acronym for incompetence. Presumably lessons have been learned and the agency will perform more effectively if needed.

Americans have been taught that the federal government will always come to their rescue and it rarely does with any efficiency and usually with a great waste of money and resources. Local first responders are usually the best and most reliable.

In a society that is utterly and completely dependent on electricity to function, it is always a sobering experience for many to discover how useless every single appliance in their home or apartment becomes without it.

I am sure I am boring people to death by repeatedly pointing to the way government at the federal and state level, along with many environmental organizations are deliberately making it difficult, if not impossible, to build coal-burning or nuclear utilities. As for transportation, the same forces are allied against any oil exploration and extraction. There hasn’t been a single new oil refinery built since the 1970s. That’s insane.

Now they are gearing up to deter natural gas extraction using “fracking” even though this technology has been in safe use for fifty years. The discovery of vast new reserves of natural gas should be greeted as welcome news by everyone. Only the luddites want us to return to mythical “simpler” times that never existed. It is still easier and a whole lot faster to take the train from New York to Washington, D.C. than to ride a horse.

If a foreign invader had imposed the same limits on our ability to access and use our own vast national reserves of coal, oil and natural gas, we would be in the streets with metaphorical pitchforks.

Returning to the theme of hurricanes, does anyone remember how Al Gore and other global warming liars were predicting that global warming would cause more hurricanes? Well, the East Coast has been through a period of some five years without one making landfall. Since there never was any dramatic global warming, there never was a connection between the two.

It’s worth remembering the previous decades since the late 1980s that were filled with reports from the full panoply of the print and broadcast media. They assured us that global warming was going to transform all life on earth unless we stopped producing carbon dioxide emissions, i.e., “greenhouse gas” emissions. It was a scam to sell bogus “carbon credits.”

This is the same bull we keep hearing about “renewable” energy, wind and solar power, along with ethanol and biofuels. The latter wastes food—corn—and the former wastes open space along with taxpayer’s and consumer’s hard earned money.

We are constantly assailed with extremely dubious, if not outright lies that involve something “scientific”, but science has been corrupted with too much environmental claptrap, political correctness, and devious chicanery. There are good sources of information, but the government and the media are not among them.

Trust your common sense. It is usually a good guide.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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It's Just a Heat Wave

By Alan Caruba

The most surprising thing about the current heat wave affecting much of the United States is that no global warming charlatan is claiming that it is the result of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Since the late 1980s, Americans were assailed with the global warming hoax until, in November 2009, the release of emails between the trolls ginning up false “climate models” were exposed.

These days the term “climate change” is used as a substitute for “global warming”, but fewer of us are fooled by this. Al Gore is planning a last-ditch effort in September to revive the hoax, but that will fail.

Even those in the mainstream media are too embarrassed to report the absurd notion that CO2, a trace gas in the Earth’s atmosphere (0.0380%) vital to all vegetation on the planet has anything to do with climate cycles. A new cooling cycle that kicked in around 1998 is the predictable result of less solar activity.

This is not to say it’s not hot. Heat waves are as common to summer months as blizzards are to winter ones. For those who possess the memory of fungus, there was a heat wave that engulfed the East Coast from July 4 through 9th in 2010. Weather records reflect that heat waves are a natural event, often following or preceding record setting cold waves.

While Al Gore and the last holdouts of the global warming hoax continue to tell us that CO2 emissions (the use of fossil fuels for energy to produce electricity, drive anywhere, and manufacture anything) will destroy the world, the world’s most sophisticated particle study laboratory, CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, will soon announce a finding that will blow the CO2 nonsense to bits.

Dennis T. Avery of the Hudson Institute, reports CERN has demonstrated “that more cosmic rays do, indeed, create more clouds in the earth’s atmosphere.” Cosmic rays are subatomic particles from outer space. More clouds means that less of the sun’s warmth reaches the Earth’s surface.

This completely overturns the torrent of lies that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been churning out for decades. The IPCC’s scientists went into full panic mood as a new cooling cycle asserted itself in 1998.

As Avery points out, the IPCC scientists had deliberately ignored “the Medieval Warming (950-1200 AD), the Roman Warming (200 BC-600BC) or the big Holocene Warmings centered on 6,000 and 8,000 BC.” There was also a Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850 to account for as well.

While the global warming crowd has been telling everyone that they must stop burning coal, using oil or natural gas, and “reduce our carbon footprint”, a recent volcanic eruption in Iceland, in just four days, negated every government-mandated effort to control or reduce CO2 emissions worldwide for the past five years! When Mt. Pinatubo erupted in 1991, it put so much smoke and other gases in the atmosphere that it cooled the Earth’s temperatures for a few years until they dissipated.

Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency is frantically issuing new rules and regulations to reduce the CO2 emissions from utilities and manufacturing facilities before the public realizes that its actual goal is to kill the U.S. economy by increasing the cost of electricity and everything else. It is insanely trying to shut down the mining of coal, while other elements of the Obama regime are trying to stop any drilling for oil.

Unable to scare everyone with the global warming hoax, new horrors are being invented, from ocean acidification to the claim that the atmosphere is being overloaded with nitrogen. Relax, there’s four times more nitrogen in the atmosphere than oxygen and it’s no big deal.

The Greens think you’re stupid

Americans need to be aware that major environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth are desperate to maintain the fictions required to deprive the U.S. of the energy it needs to function.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg just gave $50 million to the Sierra Club to support its “Beyond Coal” campaign. Bloomberg actually thinks it’s a good thing the Sierra Club has managed to stop 150 coal-burning plants from being built. Meanwhile, during the current heat wave, providers of electricity are worrying whether they can continue to meet the increased demand for it. Coal provides 50% of all the electricity we use in America.

How stupid or evil do you have to be to stop building the plants that provide electricity at a time when the population and the demand for it is rising? Must America become a third world nation with rolling blackouts and brownouts?

Friends of the Earth are in a panic that Republicans might actually get the U.S. government to cut back on the insane spending that has put the nation on the edge of sovereign default. Lately they’re claiming that Majority Leader, Eric Candor (R-VA) “is threatening to sink the American economy and undermine environmental protections so that his wealthy friends, including big oil corporations, can keep sitting on their cushions.”

That’s the same Big Oil that hasn’t been able to build a single new refinery in the U.S. since the 1970s. That’s the same Big Oil that has seen ten oil rigs leave the Gulf of Mexico since the May 2010 Obama “moratorium” for drilling sites in Egypt, Congo, French Guiana, Liberia, Nigeria, and Brazil. They took a lot of jobs and revenue with them,

If you wanted to destroy America, all you have to do is make it impossible to access several century’s worth of its own huge reserves of coal and the billions of barrels of oil inland and offshore that would, indeed, make America more energy independent.

The next time anyone speaks about “sustainability”, they are talking about turning out the lights and emptying the highways of America. The next time anyone talks about “the environment”, they mean the same thing.

So, remember, it’s just a heat wave. It will end just like all the others and, in a few months, we will all be talking about the blizzards.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Wheat, the Stuff of Revolutions

By Alan Caruba

In a recent column, Lawrence Kudlow, an economist and popular radio host, opined that “the sinking dollar and skyrocketing food prices (may have) triggered the massive unrest now occurring in Egypt—or the greater Arab world for that matter.”

When barely two percent of America’s population is engaged in agriculture, growing the crops we eat or that is fed to livestock, it is perhaps understandable that the other 98% has no clue how all that food shows up in their supermarkets and restaurants.

Methinks that the turmoil we are witnessing in Middle Eastern nations derives more from the rumblings in empty bellies than in any real concern for human rights.

Historically, food is the stuff of revolutions. It was the origin of the French revolution that toppled the monarchy and, as we watch the Middle East and the Maghreb nations of northern Africa, it was food that was the match that set off the present popular demonstrations against dictatorships of varying description.

The monthly edition of Wheat Life, a publication of the Washington Association of Wheat Growers, always features a look at the status of the “wide world of wheat.” It is particularly instructive this month.

“There’s a reason governments make every effort to keep food affordable. Just ask the deposed president of Tunisia, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. A popular uprising in the mostly desert country of 10 million was sparked by the self-immolation of a man who was arrested for selling vegetables without a license as well as rising prices, particularly bread.” Ben Ali was sent packing after decades of tight-fisted control.

The price of food along with his thirty years of control toppled Egypt’s Mubarack. As Kudlow noted, the mainstream media are so focused on the turmoil in the streets that it is “overlooking the impact of rising inflation, driven mainly by record food prices.” Egypt is the world’s largest wheat importer but “Egyptian inflation is now over 10 percent while some experts estimate that Egyptian food inflation has risen as much as 20 percent.”

Much of the world’s inflationary woes come right back to actions being taken here in the United States. “Commodities are priced in dollars, and the Federal Reserve has been overproducing dollars for more than two years." As the value of the dollar declines, it drives up the cost of everything everywhere. The rise in food costs said Kudlow is “a global phenomenon. It is a monetary phenomenon as much as anything.”

“In dollar terms,” noted Kudlow, “ the price of wheat has soared 114 percent over the past year. Corn has surged 88 percent. These are incredible numbers.” There is a reason for the increase in corn prices and it is the United States’ idiotic and insane mandate that ethanol, made from corn, be added to every gallon of gasoline. There is no justifiable reason for ethanol.

A look around the world also shows how Mother Nature is playing her role in the availability—or lack of it—of wheat. Do not fall for the “climate change” blather that hides the global warming fraud. Droughts and deluges alike are a normal part of the Earth’s weather and quite beyond the control of dictators or democracies.

In Russia, drought cut the 2010 wheat production of wheat by a third. Its government declared a moratorium on exports until the 2011 harvest. By contrast, China has had seven years of rising wheat harvests, but Chinese agricultural experts worry that grain production is increasingly concentrated in the water-scarce northern region of the nation.

So, while people around the world watch the Middle Eastern turmoil in the streets, it is factors such as the declining value of the U.S. dollar, the U.S. ethanol policies, and Mother Nature that are driving revolution.

A government that cannot affordably feed its people, it will not last for long.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → Wheat, the Stuff of Revolutions

Why am I not surprised.

Seems the Met Office knew there was a big freeze coming, but decided not to say as they'd been embarrassed by the previous "Barbecue Summer" fiasco, well that's their story anyway.

Mail.

The Met Office warned ministers to expect an ‘exceptionally cold winter’ but then kept the prediction secret from the public.

The forecaster decided not to reveal the information because it was embarrassed after wrongly predicting a ‘barbecue summer’ in 2009, BBC analyst Roger Harrabin said.

Instead of a seasonal forecast, it offered only monthly snapshots.The disclosure raises questions over whether transport authorities and councils could have been better prepared for the cold snap which brought chaos before Christmas.

As temperatures fell to a record low, train services were badly disrupted, roads were covered by snow and thousands were stranded at Heathrow as flights were cancelled and the airport struggled to clear the backlog.

Last night Mr Harrabin said: ‘With Britain shivering through a third winter in a row, shouldn’t the weather forecasters have warned us well in advance? Why didn’t the Met Office tell us?

‘The truth is it did suspect we were in for an exceptionally cold early winter, and told the Cabinet Office so in October. 

‘But we weren’t let in on the secret because the Met Office no longer publishes its seasonal forecasts due to the ridicule it suffered for predicting a barbecue summer in 2009.

‘It did forecast in November that December would be bitter, but many of us may have taken the prediction with a truckload of salt.’

So they knew, or claimed they knew. They told the government (or claimed they did) and were either ignored as the government believe it's getting warmer or just decided it might be good for a laugh to see what might happen to all the councils and transport companies who were told that they didn't need all that extra salt as 3 times in a row of bad winter weather was in the region of 5000 to 1.
Personally I like many others believe you cannot trust the Met Office further than you could throw them, their ethos has been pro global warming and carbon reduction for over a decade now. So I have my doubts they "said" anything strongly to the government, it was probably an addendum to a file for the long range forecast that the government gets but the Met Office don't publish. A bit tacked onto the end saying December might be a bit snowy, but it's unlikely because of the odds and global warming. Still it does look good them saying "we told you so" even when they probably didn't...

More about → Why am I not surprised.

Snow, snow, quick, quick, snow

Bloody awful this global warming isn't it? It's fairly chilly sitting where I sit at the moment, all the doors are open and they are loading trailers at a rate of knots as they aren't sure what the weathers going to do over the next few days, so in typical private industry style they are getting it out whilst they can (ooer missus!)
So what's the official line for the rest of the country?

Telegraph.

Snow prompts health authorities to urge Britons to stay inside

Health services have advised against travelling unless absolutely necessary as the freezing weather leads to a surge in injuries. 

Up to ten inches more snow is expected over the next 24 hours with icy conditions remaining beyond Christmas.

Blizzards up and down the country are causing poor visibility for motorists and roads that have been cleared are likely to become treacherous as they ice up overnight.

Yep, take time off and relax, never mind that your bosses and customers might be relying on you, just phone in and say "It's snowing" 
It's official, the Health service says so cos they don't want any extra work that our taxes pay them to do anyway. This is the same health services in which wages have gone up but productivity went down. Still, I don't know about you, but I'll be making the attempt to get to work tomorrow, having a 4 x 4 will help no doubt, but I'd feel honour bound to make the attempt anyway. There was only one day this year when I couldn't make it in, it was when I couldn't get my old Mondeo up the hill at the end of my street, I've changed cars since then, though I may still just park on the flat bit on the other side of my streets bollards that make it a cul de sac. Best not to take a chance that someone else might just block the street. Most people will be on their weekends, so the roads shouldn't be too bad, though it will be interesting to see what happens on Monday, if some decide they fancy an extra few days off leading up to Christmas. Might not be that many though, the teachers are now on their hols and they seem to be the biggest culprits next to council admin workers.
Still, it does look nice, if a bit cold.

More about → Snow, snow, quick, quick, snow

Wonder how the warmists will spin this one

One of the more amusing aspects of global warming, climate change, global climate disruption (and there isn't that much amusing about the amount of money this scam has raked in from the taxpayers) has been the ever more increasingly shrill explanations from the warmist camps in the face of colder and colder weather. We've had the "colder winters are all part of global warming" explanation which sounded lame even to warmists, coupled with the "weather is not climate" explanation which is now wearing a bit thin as enough weather does equal climate eventually.

Express.

BRITAIN faces a succession of harsh winters like those seen half a century ago when the country shivered in some of the coldest conditions on record.

One forecaster suggested we may even have a white Christmas this year.

The warnings come as temperatures plummeted in parts of the country to -6.6C (20.1F) on Sunday night, making it the coldest in October for 17 years.

Worldwide forecaster Weather ­Services International blamed a ­global La Nina weather pattern that sees ocean temperatures cool by up to 5C, ­subsequently cooling the rest of the planet.

Spokesman Dr Todd Crawford said: “As we head into winter, most of our important climate ­indicators are at or near record levels. Based on all of the available evidence, we expect a winter with below‑normal temperatures across the UK.

“Further, we expect the coldest weather to be early and late in the winter, with the potential for a very mild spell during the heart of winter.” He said conditions over the past three years suggested a return to weather patterns like those of the ­Fifties and Sixties.

The harsh winters of half a century ago have passed into legend. The nation came close to a standstill in the Great Freeze of 1963 when the sea off Kent froze and temperatures ­struggled to get above freezing for months on end. Last year we shivered in the ­coldest winter for 30 years.

Ian Michaelwaite, of Netweather, said: “This winter, we are convinced, is going to be colder than average for the third year in a row which is quite rare. Through November into ­December there is a good chance of a bitter cold spell which might lead to a white Christmas.

So, even the meteorologists are starting to have to skirt around the fact that it's obviously not getting any warmer, though there tendency to throw in terms like "rare" and "hurricane" as a smokescreen doesn't exactly fill me with confidence in their predictions either. They have been known to predict the weather for tomorrow completely wrong after all.
Still the house of cards that was global warming, climate change, global climate disruption continues to collapse. I suspect we're only a matter of a couple of years away from a new scam of global cooling starting up because of a lack of heavy industry in India, China and the rest of the third world so we must give them a lot more of our cash to heat up the world.
Meanwhile our pensioners will die as we struggle through a succession of cold winters because of the price of the environmental levy on fuel bills coupled with the fact that on the coldest of days, the bird choppers wind farms don't work.
I expect that will be about the time that the politicians will distance themselves from the green lobby and deny they ever believed in global warming, climate change, global climate disruption, but we know who they are, Huhne, Milliband E,  most of the Labour party and Lib Dems too, as well as far too many Tories.
They saw it as a tax scam, hopefully we'll make them pay for their greed and arrogance, but it will I suspect be a pyrrhic victory as these so called leaders will have lead the country into disaster and depression as we wont have the means necessary to keep our people alive in bitterly cold winters.

More about → Wonder how the warmists will spin this one

Summer? What summer?

The Victorians used to reckon the 1st of September as being the first day of autumn, though technically it should be on or around the 21st (equinox) So there is a headline around saying summer is over.

Telegraph.

Last week’s final seven days of the school holidays saw a run of almost wall-to-wall sunshine across most parts of the country and temperatures up to 22C.

But the Met Office said autumnal weather arrives on Monday with no sign of an Indian Summer as the rest of September sees sharp showers rather than sunshine. 

The forecast dashes hopes of Britons clinging onto the thought of a decent September to make up for the coldest August in 17 years.

A Met Office statement warned of possible gale-force winds across England and Scotland on Tuesday.

Forecaster Charlie Powell said: “We had a decent last week of summer in the last week of the school holidays - but from Monday we get an autumnal feel to the weather.

“We had a nice last week but it will now be wetter and windier, as Monday sees a change from the dry weather we enjoyed last week.

“The emphasis is on persistent, heavy rain in the west and south-west parts of the UK on Monday, with stronger winds with very breezy conditions in more easterly parts due to south-easterly winds.

“The rain pushes north-east across the country on Monday night and it will remain breezy further north-east, with sharp showers between clearer spells.

“The same is true on Wednesday, but the showers will be heavier and with a risk of thunder and lightning and temperatures not feeling too great.

“Thursday and Friday see more showers either side of dry spells as the weather turns markedly more unsettled across the UK.

“And looking into the next week or two, showers and longer spells of rain will affect many parts.

“The rest of the month will be unsettled with no sign of any more decent settled weather on the horizon.”

Now admittedly the weather in the Northeast was pretty good last week and from what I'm told has been ok throughout most of August. In the Southeast however particularly Kent we've not had a good summer, it was pretty cold up until the 21st of June, then on technically the first day of summer it was like someone up there had switched on the bars of an electric fire for a couple of weeks and it got pretty warm for a while. But as soon as the kids started their holidays, it calmed down, not cold, but certainly no blazing summer either. The BBC were even forced to tell us about the brushfires due to hot weather in Russia to support their global warming climate change agenda whilst conveniently ignoring the cooler weather elsewhere in the Northern hemisphere as well as the bitterly cold weather in the Southern hemisphere. Of course this is just "weather" we're told, climate is something else, though it seems to me if you get enough weather it becomes climate, then again I'm probably guilty of applying common sense here as a complete layman when it comes to this sort of thing.
So no barbecue summer, though we had a few barbecues, the weather was better in the North but not amazingly so, Scotland apparently was quite cold at times. Certainly what is going on doesn't match the predictions of anyone, though many in the warmist camp still like to pontificate as if they know what is happening (whilst denying any and all mentions of shenanigans within their corrupt camp)
So, my predictions for next year?

We'll have lots of weather and nobody will get it completely right what kind it will be.

More about → Summer? What summer?

Cold

Well I was working nightshift last night (tonight as well) and wow I discovered a new level of meaning of the word cold. I'm usually wrapped up quite warm anyway though the warehouse is exposed to the elements a little mostly due to the fact that it's difficult to load lorries with the doors closed. Now it was only minus 2 last night according to the thermometer, but that didn't take into consideration the wind chill from a brisk breeze howling in up the Thames and straight through the doors. I'm not sure what temperature it felt like, but I know I haven't felt that cold before.
One of my hobbies is hill walking, so I know all about layering and keeping warm and I have the right gear to do it, but I'm not allowed to wear it at work, however, works corporate wear, even with the overfleece is not what I'd call quality issue, coupled with the fact that most of the equipment I work on (cranes and conveyors) is steel and gloves are not really suitable then it becomes a race to do the job quickly before your hands stiffen up and gripping tools becomes problematical (sitting on a steel girder is not a lot of fun either, I think I've avoided haemorrhoids though) I think the forklift drivers thought I was a bit mad as I would wander over and stand behind the machines to get a warm blast from their radiator fans (every little helps)
Tonight I'm thinking of hiding in the office with the heaters on, though I know I probably wont, the work ethic is deeply ingrained with me though I am tempted to take some proper thermal gear in with me, at least that way I'll be able to concentrate on what I'm doing rather than how I'm feeling.
Hypothermia is no joke, though it isn't really mentioned that much as a cause of death.

Table 1: Number of deaths of persons aged over 65 years who died at home, where (a) hypothermia was the secondary cause of death, and (b) where hypothermia was mentioned anywhere on the death certificate( 1, 2) , England and Wales, 1999 to 2008( 3)
Deaths (Persons)
	(a) Secondary cause	(b) Any mention
1999	26	36
2000	15	21
2001	16	27
2002	17	21
2003	18	22
2004	18	26
2005	17	27
2006	15	20
2007	14	21
2008	21	23
(1) Hypothermia was defined using the International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision (ICD-9) code 991.6 for the years 1999 to 2000, and the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10) code T68, for the years 2001 to 2008. (2) Deaths reported as (a) secondary cause are included in those reported as (b) any mention. (3) Figures are for deaths registered in each calendar year.

It is however a contributory cause to the 30 to 40,000 winter related deaths in the UK. People get cold, they slow down, they stop eating, they die, mostly the old, mostly low income.

I dread to think what the deaths for this period (2009/10) will be, it's been a bad winter and it's not over yet, not that the government has helped by wasting our money on global warming prevention and expensive "green" energy schemes. People are running out of money, pensions don't increase in line with costs, fuel bills are up, means food costs more, means people can't afford to heat there homes and so end up living in one room eating toast.

Labour have cost the people of this country dearly over the last 13 years, now they are costing people their lives because they didn't put anything by for a rainy day. Putting it right will cost, people, the old, the sick will fall by the wayside this winter as the great global warming scam falls apart and leaves us having spent billions on wasted energy initiatives. yet still 30% of the population (well those who will vote) might vote for them.

Some days I think people who vote labour must be mad, days like today I'm absolutely certain of it. Though God alone knows how the Tories can put things right even assuming they get into power.
Perhaps it's time for change, to get rid of the old parties and start again with people who actually care about this country rather than lining their own pockets, perhaps it's time we all voted anything other than Lib/Lab/Con.

More about → Cold

Snow

Can't get to work today, not exactly snowed in, but I can't get my car up the hill at the end of my street because it's a skidpan and the bottom end is closed off to stop a rat run onto a small industrial estate.
Someone has nicked the salt bins that were at the top and bottom of the hill and a car crashed into a lamppost, then almost hit another car trying to come down the hill when I was trying to get up it.
I know residential areas aren't priorities for gritting, but it would have been nice. It would have been nice to have some salt bins too (with salt) but the gits that nicked them have put paid to that.
Fortunately my boss is understanding, he managed to get cover for me and I'll ring him later to let him know if I can get out of the street for tomorrow. I hate doing this, I know it wasn't my fault (I suppose I could have parked elsewhere, but I didn't) but someone else has been inconvenienced by me and my working ethics make me uncomfortable doing it to them.

It's snowing even as I write this, doesn't look good for tomorrow, still it is pretty to look at.

Update: I finally managed to get out of the street at 14:30, thanks to a very civic minded pensioner digging away at the ice and snow and clearing a way for me. I finally returned to help the guy clear away the top (trickiest) part of the hill so his Mrs could escape too. Salt turned up off a wagon about 15:30 (ish Thanks to John Ward and his contacts on Medway Council) and we got those who wanted out of the street out in time for dusk when it started to freeze again.

This is the car of the poor guy who hit the lamppost, it's an 09 Jag, I would have wept myself, now I'm just considering buying a 4 x 4 for next year.

More about → Snow