For lack of any other topic to think about (quickly), tonight's SNLC is devoted to the wintry weather wreaking havoc on chunks of the country, including chunks of that aren't used to such cold. You can read some of the stats from this NPR blog post, including this one:
"By Thursday evening, about 550,000 customers remained in the dark, mostly in South Carolina and Georgia."
Where I live, it hasn't been that bad, but that may not be the same where you are. More (sort of) below the flip.....
It seems that every week from checking weather.com, a new storm with a new name comes up just about as frequently. The list of storm names for 2013-2014 is available from this page at weather.com, where I did not know that the list was:
"Developed with the help of a Latin class at Bozeman High School"
Boola boola for Bozeman High. Last week, it was Winter Storm Pax, and this week, it's Winter Storm Quintus. Any bets as to whether we'll run through the whole alphabet by the end of this winter?
I'll admit to one snarky thought about seeing this line from the NPR blog post, which came by way of the Associated Press:
"More than 6,500 flights were canceled across the country, according to the website FlightAware."
So in other words, all the CO
2 that would have been emitted from those planes got deferred. Of course, once planes were back in the air, the flight CO
2 would have occurred anyway. But perhaps every plane would have been full, so that the overall degree of CO
2 would have dropped a bit. I don't know.
Of course, part of that would be expected to be negated by all the cars that idle as a result of traffic accidents, like this one on Friday on the PA Turnpike. Obviously the first concern is for the 30 injured people in the accident. Going to the next tier, it was interesting then to see this one comment about one person caught in the traffic backlog behind the accident:
"David Hill, 27, was about a mile back and had turned his car off to save gas. Given the nearest exit was about 2 1/2 miles away, he anticipated being there for hours.
'There's no possible way,' he said. 'I'm stuck.'"
On a micro-level, Hill was obviously smart to save gas that way, but he also slowed (or at least delayed) greenhouse gas emissions from his car in that way also. Admittedly, things would be slow after he and fellow drivers would finally be able to clear the scene.
So has anyone had major snow day experiences to share? They can serve as loser stories of the week, if others don't quite qualify. But otherwise, you know the drill......