Amsterdam is now on day three of societal meltdown due to upwards of two inches of snow
I knew they’d be less prepared than Boston but this is worse than I anticipated. #amsterdam #netherlands
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Discussion
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At least you don't have hills. You should see what happens in Seattle. (Scroll past midpoint of the video to see a bus driver try really hard to inch down the hill – and still fail horribly.)
Whereas I live an hour and a half away from Seattle, up in the North Cascades, and get snow every year. Bad enough I own a snow blower.
It doesn't even slow some people down up here.
Sliding Cars in Seattle Snow on 11/22/10
YouTube
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@jackwilliambell well they closed the highway for a while because on-ramps and off-ramps are a kind of hill and yes, there was at least one case of a bus doing what you think
@0xabad1dea Back when I lived in Swansea, we typically got snow one day a year. The council knew this and had a reserve of enough salt / grit for the roads for two weeks of snow. As soon as the snow started to fall, they'd get the gritters out. The parks would be a bit exciting to walk through, but roads and major footpaths were fine.
Then one year someone on the council noticed that two weeks was a bit excessive as a reserve to maintain so they cut it down to one week. Still overkill for a place where it snows one day a year.
One or two winters before I left, it snowed solidly for two weeks. After the first week, they had used up their reserves. They managed to get a bit more, but only enough for the biggest roads. Taxis gave up trying to run and a load of shops couldn't get their deliveries. When I went away for Christmas, the nearest little branches of two of the big supermarket chains had huge gaps on their shelves and were mostly out of fresh produce. I had to walk to the station because there were no taxis and the buses were on a fairly random schedule. This would normally have taken about half an hour, but dragging a suitcase over compacted ice on a steep slope meant it was over an hour (and I fell on my back once). I've no idea what folks with limited mobility did that week.
Planning for unusual weather events is going to have to become common for councils.
@0xabad1dea Apparently most flights from and to NL are cancelled, too, German news mention
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@GreenSkyOverMe yeah, I'm perplexed that apparently not even *Schiphol* has the equipment to keep w moderate amount of snow and ice off the runways – there's no high winds, and it's almost always ultracloudy here anyway...
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@0xabad1dea @GreenSkyOverMe Schiphol has been on shaky grounds re: basically everything for years now, and the turnover has been so bad that I wouldn't be surprised if no one working there now has had experience of large snowfall + Schiphol, even though the last time must have been barely 5 years ago if that, and the last proper large snowfall was 8 years back...
@0xabad1dea Apparently Germany delivered de-icer to Schiphol as an emergency measure (or is in the process of delivering, not sure)
both of the tram lines that pass by my house have individually derailed. they didn't even try it with the busses.
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@0xabad1dea i remember how once Hong Kong (plumbing goes on the outside of the house) got a bunch of snow unexpectedly
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@whitequark @0xabad1dea I once heard an Elizabeth Zwicky sysadmin war story from the late 80s or early 90s about how SRI's (I think) Bay Area machine room overheated during a rare Bay Area freezing snap ... because the AC pipes ran outside on the roof and no one had insulated them because why would you need to in the Bay Area of all places. So the sysadmins had to run around opening doors and windows to let all the outside freezing cold air in to cool the place down enough.
@whitequark oof. I'm surprised it's even physically possible to get snow there.
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@0xabad1dea I think everybody involved was surprised. MTR was stopped for the day iirc because nobody has accounted for the possibility
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@whitequark @0xabad1dea you might be misremembering that, according to every source i could find there hasn't been snow in Hong Kong since 1975, and even that was on a single mountain peak
@0xabad1dea
Busses can't derail.
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@gevoel … they can crash
@0xabad1dea
I... didn't know that can happen.
Stay safe, stay warm!
@0xabad1dea y'all having a very Detusche Bahn moment right now
@0xabad1dea your trams need snow to derail? Wrocław, Poland trams frequently derail on their own
@0xabad1dea it does not make sense (economically) because we rarely get "this much" snow anymore.
@0xabad1dea it's because everyone is preparing for the Elfstedentocht.
on the other hand, I've gotten one (1) work email so far this week and it was someone announcing they'd somehow made it to the office with treats in tow
@0xabad1dea can you really blame us though? It hasn't snowed this bad in decades.
@0xabad1dea the knmi “extreme weather” warnings don’t help much, but yeah… we’ve managed to completely forget how to deal with even the tiniest amount of snow.
@0xabad1dea it's easy not to notice how much infrastructure there is to snow removal. Our plow trucks (Rochester, NY) look like siege engines out of a Star Wars movie. And we have hundreds of them.
How many does Amsterdam have? And do they look like Ford Broncos with plow blades attached?
It makes a difference.
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@kahomono the answer appears to be zero plow trucks.
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@0xabad1dea @kahomono Heck, in Mass in the 1990's a lot of them were ford broncos with plow blades, but there was a density of like 10 per square mile.
@0xabad1dea When I was living in NYC, snow seemed like a shock to practically everyone.
That was fun - until the day (well, turned to days) when I was trying to go back to Europe the day after a heavy snow day and everything was stuck.
@0xabad1dea does nobody know how to shovel?