Snow chaos

[Gef]

A few snow flakes and a lot of south east England grinds to a halt. This is the 21st century surely we can do better.

[mykola]

friday..

[Pinotage]

It was more than a few snow flakes where I was. In St Albans, Herts, 2 inches of snow fell in 2 hours. At 2.30pm there was no snow, at 3.30pm I caould barely see the end of my garden for swirling snow blown by fierce winds, and there was an inch of snow, when I went out at 4.30 there was 2 inches of snow and it was falling just as fast.

[kendunlop]

Although it was forecast, the Highways Agebcy have a lot to answer for in their response times. There should have been no excuses for a major motorway being brought to a halt like that. Here in Perthshire, main roads are well gritted in advance. Last month I was on the A9 at 2pm one day and my car temp gauge read 7 degrees and the GRITTERS WERE OUT because ice was forecast that night. Also in our town, small tractors drive on the pavements gritting them when there is a hard frost or ice. Have never seen them anywhere else. I'm sure the word "budget" springs to many minds.

[woodpam]

Lucky Pinotage, looking out at the garden from, presumably, the cosy sitting room. I was looking at the A1 in Hertfordshire for 6 hours and occasionally performing an impressive slalom between broken down cars and lorries. It just came down so fast and the roads were so ill prepared that the result was inevitable. I stopped to help a biker who had slid off the road at one point and ended up feeling very grateful for the protection of my car. It occurs to me that it's very easy to gridlock the whole M25 and the motorways which feed onto it and we need to weigh up the cost of extra gritting equipment with the cost to industry, the NHS who see the results of accidents and the other associated costs of this chaos before deciding on what the budget should be for prevention. BTW I was particularly annoyed that the mobile phone networks were unable to cope and so people who had broken down couldn't get help, including one injured and frozen biker. Surely with the profits they have made they could provide more capacity?