Winter Storm

[Jimmy Chen Shiba]

I understand nasty winter storm has arrived, affecting the Northeast in particular. Just wishing all is well despite the snow and cold. Years back, I lived in western Massachusetts for few years so I understand how nasty winter storm can be. I was in LA early few weeks ago and it was unusually "cold" there too.

Fortunately, the region where I live (in Japan) is just cold with no snow. However much of the rest is having winter storm with heavy snow and cold.

Safe Holidays to all. w/ smiles Jimmy

[tyang]

Hi Jimmy,

Thanks for your well wishes!

I don't know what's worse. Getting over 20 inches of snow overnight in my area, or getting 5 inches in London! We were dug out 24 hours after the start of the storm, and my wife made it to the store for milk in my fwd Honda without a problem (snow tires help), but from what I heard, London was paralyzed for days!

I wish everyone has a great New Year, and stops to enjoy whatever weather you get. I know I had a blast sledding with my daughter after I shoveled out the cars!

Tom

[Tom Wilson]

My daughter Colleen barely made it out of Scotland for Christmas. They closed both Edinburgh Airport and Heathrow within hours of her flight taking off. She was delayed a couple of hours, but that was better than my nephew, who was hung up 6 days in London. He finally managed a flight from Manchester to Munich to San Francisco and got home in time for Christmas.

Of course, Colleen got home to Los Angeles just in time for the biggest storm we have seen in a long time. 8" of rain in 4 days! I don't live near the hills, so we didn't have to deal with the mudslides caused by last years fires. However, as a Landlord, I had roof leaks to deal with all over California. With this much rain, the water gets to places it has never been before, so we get leaks in roofs that were just fine in the rain earlier this month. Try explaining that to the tenants though...

In spite of all that, Christmas was beautiful in Los Angeles. We had Sunshine and a few clouds, but lots of snow on the surrounding mountains. Today it is 75 and sunny, so the roofers are finally climbing out from under their desks. Guess I better hit the phones..

[Yale]

NYC in a winter storm is a pretty cool thing. Everything stops, it gets quiet and makes the city feel in a way that it does at no other time. This storm however was for some reason different then any other I've seen, perhaps because most storms happen in the middle of the night, this one however started at 1 in the afternoon. So driving around a full day later I saw a taxi stopped in the middle of Sixth Ave. with snow piled up by plows all around it, abandoned at some point during the storm because driving got too precarious for what could have been an Asian driver unused to driving in such weather much less with the almost bald tires most cabs seem to have. I saw a bus abandoned at a bus stop, I saw another bus just abandoned in the middle if the street! And the most surprising, I saw a salt truck stuck in the snow with a plow truck, a huge tow truck and a garbage truck all trying to get it out. Now mind you all of this was a full day after the storm. Usually a big storm comes, dumps on NYC and everything is quite and clean for a day and plowed soon after. Not this time.

[JAshburne]

I remember a New York City snowstorm back in the mid 1980's where people were cross country skiing up Third Avenue and the BQE near where I lived in Brooklyn was completely shut down because it was littered with abandoned cars and trucks. It was 2 days before those vehicles were cleared so that the road could be opened and 3 days before my little side street in Cobble Hill was plowed.

One of the nice things about NYC is that a car is not even close to essential to get around the city and so life didn't get too disrupted even during that storm.