Having lived in Norway most of my 40+ years on this earth, I can with some confidence say that this is not an universal truth. I don’t think I’ve experienced any power interruption of over 1 hour in winter ever, and it’s been at least 5 years since the last time. Yes it snows here. A lot.
I live in Mammoth where the town is significantly snowier than say Truckee or lake level Tahoe. The grocery store is open and operating normally no matter how snowy it is. Including the 22/23 winter when 695" fell in town. Lots of buildings did collapse that year though and snow removal was a constant struggle.
But A-frames or other very angled roofs are not typical here, roofs have to handle 300 lbs/sq foot, and there are requirements for where a roof is allowed to shed to. Typically they will angle in one direction to control where shedding happens. Keeping the snow on the roof also provides insulation, in a typical snow year we may do basically no removal and just have a blanket of snow on the roof the whole winter.
Outages that long aren't common, but it's not uncommon to lose power for about a day a few times each winter.
Snow can be bad enough to a point where even modern cement build building can have trouble.
EDIT: I didn't realize A-frame refers to a _very_ steep angle instead of "just" a slightly steeply tilted roof.
And A-frame roof help but do _not_ magically fix it, with the right kind of snow condition it can get stuck to the roof anyway and turn into ice there. This can be dangerous in 2 ways. 1. Weight and 2. if it randomly comes all crashing down potentially hitting people. And sure it's should be a rare exception if you have stable build buildings. But rare exceptions happens anyway even in places with good infrastructure and/or cities etc.
Similar while power outages really should not happen, sometimes there are natural catastrophes (or terrorist attacks) and power is gone for days anyway.
Being prepared helps. Even if it's a situation which counts as natural disaster and external help will be provided, knowing that you aren't reliant on it and they can focus on people much more in need is nice.
PS: I'm not a preper or anything, just prepared in the sense of basic knowledge and some minimal preparations like flash lights, water, food you can eat without stove, a larger battery, somewhat weather proof clothes, etc. Nothing fancy, nothing usable long term. Just enough to bridge some days of an local emergency situation.
A-frames are steeply-angled enough that the weight mostly loads on itself (i.e. a snow drift builds up against the side of the house) rather than loading the roof. The whole point of the design is to be steeper than the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angle_of_repose of snow, so that snow can't pile up on the roof to the point that it forms ice; it must slough off quickly, as soon as it reaches some aggregation threshold — just like water droplets must drip down off a shower door after some aggregation threshold.
("Slow" snowfall, meanwhile, gets melted away rather than frozen on; the A-frame is the entire building envelope, and is also usually made of a highly thermally-conductive material; together, these properties mean that 99% of heat lost from the interior is lost into this giant metal heatsink that wraps around the building, where the heat then conducts quickly inside that giant metal heatsink, warming up whatever cold spots there are anywhere along its surface. As long as the building has any kind of heating going on inside, the roof is essentially acting like a heated windshield.)
A-frames also go all the way to the ground. There's nowhere for a person to stand where "snow (or even ice) sloughing off the sides" is dangerous, because there's never a plummet phase to that slough-off; the snow arrives at the ground with very little speed, having been lightly friction-braked the whole time, since it was basically sliding down a metal slide. (That being said, you would never build an A-frame house under the expectation of having accessible sidewalks around it during the winter. You assume that snow drifts will pile up on both sides. You want to go to the back yard? You go through the house. This is also why you never see an A-frame surrounded with a fence: the inevitable snowdrift would knock any side-fences over.)
Home design is a game of engineering tradeoffs with the occasional new technology to improve things or lower costs.
enough snow, especially if compacted, especially if it involves melting + refreezing cycles turning part of it too ice and even robust concrete building can have some surprising issues
but it's true that for what most places in the world need a slightly tilted and structural stable roof is good enough, if you know how to clean it if things to south
As TFA emphasizes, grid electricity is unstable in rural places in winter; which means that even if such a building were able to be grid-connected (often not), and even if the building's owner was willing to spend electricity heating the building year-round in their absence (almost certainly not), the building would be likely to lose electricity at the worst possible moment: when there's tons of snow piling up and no humans there to shovel it.
A-frame or even 45degree angle roofs are very rare.
The other benefit of an A-frame is that the snow drifts deeply enough that winter-only cabins don't need as much insulation, because there's a 4m drift on all sides except the front.
Those kinds of places are also where you find "doors to nowhere" on the 2nd floor, because that's the winter access. One door at ground level for summer, one door ~1.5-2m up for winter.
I love visiting, but I'll never live there!
Helsinki, for example, only gets a total of ~90cm a year. So the mountain sees more snow in a single event some years than Helsinki all year.
Upwards of 80cm in finnish lapland, so quite a bit of snow, but not the ~2-3 meters common in the high sierras and cascades. This is mostly because the elevation is low and the sea exposure is smaller (wind blows from the pacific over the mountain and dumps snow). The Paradise Snowtel on Ranier, for example, routinely has 3-6 meters / 10-20 feet of snow in winter, and is one of the snowiest places on earth. The only place I'm aware of that has more is Aomori Prefecture in Japan and they have similar geography.
I would add that you should have a backup plan for preparing any holiday meal using a camping stove because the power could go out an hour into roasting a turkey. In fact don’t invite anyone over unless you’ve confirmed ahead of time that they don’t mind sleeping in the same room, together with your family, in front of the wood stove. This could happen even on a clear day. Don’t rely on the electricity in the winter ever.
I live on the west side of puget sound, and get two nines of utility power. Undergrounding distribution lines is very expensive given the natural expenses of undergrounding and the shallow soil most of the region has. Undergrounding transmission lines is basically not happening outside of very special cases. Shallow soil also makes trees less stable, so that makes treefall -> utility outage more probable. Roads can get pretty nasty in winter storms too which also contributes to high time to repair.
People can say "bad infrastructure" all you want, but nobody wants to pay a lot more to fight geography for one more nine. Also at least in my community, every tree is sacred even though it's all third growth backfill from multiple clear cuts over the past who knows.
Article doesn't even mention cell towers go down in extended outages. Around me, it's about 4-6 hours, a little longer overnight, but only 30 minutes past when people wake up.
Not just outside, I spent 15 years in/around Austin and it got to be ridiculous.
2020 - cleared out the stores at covid.. alright, few people were prepared, none had done it before
2021 - cleared out the stores for the blizzard, lost power for 45min and water for 5 days.. almost no one was prepared, despite the year before
2023 - cleared out the stores for the blizzard, lost power for days due to heavy icing.. some were prepared but not at scale
Some people just don't learn.
Luckily after '20, we prepared. Then in '21, we moved to rural Texas and got solar+battery backup so 2023 wasn't even a blip.
That said I remember power could go out from a lightning storm or without any reason. But pretty rarely
He said they tended to build “two of everything,” which is why there’s so many sets of two.
If one craps out, the second can be used in its place, or scavenged for parts.
But people still do have chalets/huts in the mountains, and the authorities won't spend money on burying 10 km of cables in complicated terrain just for a small hut colony or a solitary hut. Which means that the cables go through the air, which means that a fallen tree can sever them, and you won't be particularly prioritized. That said, people who actually live there or spend longer holidays there during winter months, tend to have enough firewood collected to survive such situations comfortably.
It is a different story in cities/villages with compact house patterns. I don't think I ever saw a snow-related blackout in such a place. There, your worst risk is actually flooding. We've had some serious floods in the last decades, and even buried cables will get damaged and short-circuited in such an event. For example, the cable needs to cross a stream, so it is attached to a bridge, high water comes and tears down the entire bridge with the cable as well.
I have lived in Norway all of my >45 years on this earth and I can say that in the first half of my life were I lived on the west coast, power outages was totally expected.
We had a generator, and we had a gas stove ("everyone" in Norway use electricity for cooking) for those days, a kerose lamp and a wood stove.
The longest power outage I experienced was 3 days, somewhere around 1986 I think, but a few hours could happen multiple times and overnight outages were not unusual.
> Ottawa Hydro restored power to just over half its customers after one week
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_2022_Canadian_derecho
Fortunately, you can't freeze to death in May, and the roads are clear so you just go to where the power is.
Seems to be a maintenance issue, trees are not cleared well enough. Sambo said that the warmer winters make the trees more likely to fall over.
like if a typical winter is slightly but consistently below 0C then a warmer winter would have
- more black ice
- more ice rain
- more snow melting and refreezing (so ice on roofs, ground or trees etc.)
- wetter snow (so heavier)
etc.
Through where I live it is/was the opposite this year. Normally we have mostly above 0C degrees and rarely ice rain/black ice or similar. Also some way colder days (-10C and below) too cold to have much ice issues. This year for ~a month the temperature did non stop bounce between enough above 0 during the day to slightly melt things (but not fully) and below 0 at evening + cold ground to fully freeze any water produced by melting. So non stop icy walkways, streets etc. for nearly a month. During the last days before it got warmer some unmaintained walk way I passed by had 4cm of solid ice on it. At the same time it wasn't cold enough to do ice skating on lakes. It really wasn't a nice winter.
It can take days to bring a grid back up after a major outage. The lead time to replace a city-sized transformer is nearly 4 years, now (ask Puerto Rico about that).
https://www.powermag.com/the-transformer-crisis-an-industry-...
We have buried lines and have few if any power issues. richer town a bit over does not, and loses power once a winter or so.
Even when I was living in the snowier parts of America we didnt lose power. I would say losing power is not a universal truth in the slightest.
Since that storm, we have decided to buy a second fireplace for upstairs with a cooking top.
But it can happen anywhere, so you should be prepared anyway. Like I'm living in a city and had a surprise 5 day power outage this winter. And it's not a place with bad infrastructure I can't remember any noticeable power outage in the last 8+ years. But unusual shit happened and power was gone for days.
Luckily it wasn't too cold. But at the last night before power was returned it was 10C in my room. Not too bad if you are prepared, very much bad if you are not (as it was the last day I was kinda half prepared, that night did suck).
So everyone expects multiple power off a year and every household has generators and stock of fuel and matches for emergency.
Locals have a “it’s gonna be fine” attitude against a poor (but expensive) infrastructure. I was really disappointed, growing up in Europe, where a power off it’s extremely rare (even if we have rain and snow).
More of a it's not going to be fine but we will deal with it.
1000+KMs away in/not far from the capital city of Queensland it's not unheard of to have a multi-day power outage after a severe storm.
Considering QLD is almost 6x the size of Norway it's not actually that bad.
I can still hear all the trees just exploding. It was wild.
I think this comes back to the framing of the article, stated as universal truths when it's really just someone who was woefully unprepared for a snow storm and subsequent power outage. Life threatening and horribly inconvenient for them yes, but nowhere near a universal experience.
Prepare a few days ahead getting groceries, gas, etc. Make sure firewood totes are full. It starts snowing. Do a little shovel work to keep fire fed, if power goes out (rare, but always possible of course) a little more shovel work to set up generator. Wait for snow to stop, clean up with snowblower/tractor/shovels/etc, taking a variable number of sessions depending on how much snow fell.
The main lesson is "be prepared", not all the little things the author got surprised by due to a wholesale lack of preparation.
Regardless, "my power never goes out" isn't a great plan for what to do if your power goes out. Ask Texas, they once thought the same.
I live in a formerly industrial city in the US that gets serious snow every year and probably a multi foot storm every couple years. My power outages in the past decade consist of several seconds long blips and one 1hr outage at 8am on a national holiday when a transformer on my street went bang.
My extended family lives hundreds of miles away in the same state, in a lesser snow climate in a city within spitting distance of the same population and density. They have power outages out the wazoo because the utilities can't cut trees and can't update infrastructure without the towns acting as a roadblock at the behest of a bunch of Karens who don't wan't their decorative 100yo trees losing limb and don't want construction activity to maintain or improve anything (not just utilities, they're actually less burdened but burdened nonetheless) performed without intentionally prohibitive and expensive environmental study this and approval that and so of course less gets done proactively.
I'll leave assuming the demographic makeup of these cities and relative wealth levels up to the reader but I assure you it tracks stereotypes.
they're expecting to spend 10B burying lines in the mountains.
New england is pretty much one big rock garden/shelf where you're not digging through soil in alot of places but rock ledges.
Whatever weather people are used to will be handled seamlessly. If it's unusual, it will cause failures. Doesn't really matter what kind of weather it is.
This is basically the Netflix Chaos Monkey theory of systems, applied to weather response.
(A friend of mine lives in Shanghai. She's shocked whenever I mention a power failure; in her mind, a functioning country wouldn't have them at all.)
This just isn’t true, at all - electricity is regularly out for hundreds or thousands of people in Sweden because of snow. This year was especially bad, where thousands were without any electricity for up to 10 or 12 days, but every year brings the same problems. Just google “elavbrott snö” and you’ll find many current examples - just as one instance:
https://www.horisontmagasin.se/2026/01/06/nya-elavbrott-nu-p...
I don't think that's something that can be solved with just "build quality"... but it presumably could be solved through "maintainence" (cutting down or trimming trees, although that requires identifying the problem, permissions, a willingness to have decreased tree coverage, etc.)
I lived in the Oklahoma and in Minnesota, and the difference there is already stark:
* OK suffered from plenty of storm-induced winter power outages (massive freezing rain cycles were common in my life). My mother's cotton bath robe, which she kept using until late in her life, had burn marks from when she reached for something over a lit candle during a power outage when I was four years old.
* MN suffers some, but people knew to develop meaningful contingency plans.
Both states have variegated buried-power-to-the-premises usage. It's not really to be expected as the norm in either place, but MN has far more than OK (funnily enough I grew up in a place in OK with it). Either way, the infrastructure robustness in North America looks like it arose from a dismal cost-benefit analysis versus a societal welfare consideration.
I left North America about 14 years ago for Europe. The difference is stark. We've only had one significant power interruption in that time (not even in winter); whereas stochastic neighborhood outages were commonplace in North America. What really freaks me out about the situation in North America is just the poor insulation of the structures and their low thermal mass. They will get cold fast.
Aside: A lot of friends and family in North America balked at the idea of getting a heat pump due to performance during a power outage: "when the power goes out, I can still run my gas." When I asked them whether the house was heated with forced air or used an electronic thermostatic switches, the snarky smile turned to a grimace.
When you live in a cold place, you learn to do things differently. You're naive if you don't pack warm blankets and water in your vehicle, for instance. You never know when you might find yourself stranded somewhere due to vehicular breakdown …
I believe this has to do with the design of the North American split phase vs European three-phase grid. The European grid has more centralized, larger neighborhood step-down transformers, whereas the US has many more decentralized smaller pole-mounted transformers. NA proponents say any given outage will affect fewer people, EU proponents say it's easier to maintain fewer pieces of infrastructure.
(That said I live in Japan where we have a US-style grid and have only had like 2, <5 min outages during typhoons and nothing else so maybe it's just the quality of the maintenance)
yes, obviously "put on your own oxygen mask before helping others" (so you remain an asset instead of a liability), but please remember the "helping others" part (so you remain an asset instead of a liability).
They've also lost power from rolling blackouts due to not having enough power plants, but that's a California thing, at least compared to first-world countries. In a similar vein, a substation in the city my dad grew up in was once taken out by a sniper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack
I lived through two >24hr power outages at my previous place that had buried power lines into the subdivision. Both due to lightning strikes on trees that happened to be close to the buried lines. The lightning then fed into the line, and you could literally see black scorch marks on the lawn that followed the wiring until it eventually dissipated.
This required digging up 30-40ft of melted wiring each time and re-running it. These appeared to be direct-burial cables fwiw.
Talking to the utility guys, it was pretty common for this to be the failure mode. I found it pretty interesting and somewhat ironic.
How does that compare to Norway?
In the population wise very small county here I live in Sweden we haven't come that far yet, so when the storms a while ago did their thing some people were without power for several days. Mine was out for some six hours or so. The forests around here look like "plukkepinn" and tore down many, many above ground power lines.
When I grew up in the late eighties, early nineties further south we had interruptions at every other thunderstorm and most regular storms. This is one reason why we had a wood stove and self-circulation for heating rather than a heat pump. Around the turn of the millenium they buried the power lines and since then my family there see almost no interruptions.
The other main ways you lose snow are: sublimation, wind blowing it elsewhere, compaction, and getting dirty (darker color helps it melt in the sun). All of these are relevant for other cities in the snow.
this is how glaciers are created
snow getting stuck up, not melting, compressing by weight into much much smaller ice and then more stacking up. And during the last ice age this repeating for a very long time (because snow is mostly air, so the amount of ice you get from it is very little).
The reasons why this isn't too big of an issue on the north/south pool, Antarctica etc. is because this places are also very dry/don't have a lot of snow fall.
To have snowfall you need water in the air. Which mostly comes from heat evaporating water. This doesn't happen in non stop freezing cold places.
So the wind needs to carry the wet air over.
But there is a gradient between hot wet air places and very cold places. So a lot of water rains or snows off before reaching the places where snow doesn't melt.
A large part of the south pool is technically a desert as it has hardly any _new_ snow fall. Just a lot of years old snow getting moved around by wind.
About 350,000 people live there, and winter temperatures can drop to –64°C (−83°F).
And regardless of the temperature or time of year, they have shopping malls, restaurants, and everything else you might expect to find in any big city.
Here are a few recent videos I enjoyed:
24 Hours in the Coldest City on Earth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-WGGDRyf68
How We Live in the World's Coldest City - Typical Apartment Tour
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikUSFU7TlYc
How We Heat Our APARTMENT at -64°C| -83°F
Of course, large commercial kitchens often have walk-in refrigerators and walk-in freezers.
In Yakutsk, you have an open-air walk-out freezer.
There are a few months in the summer when temperatures are similar to the Bay Area. I could probably wear my usual aloha shirts!
o If you're walking out in the cold, have many different ways to keep your feet and your hands warm, because usually, you'll have a good-enough coat and winter-pants that'll keep your core relatively warm, but it's the very ends of your extremities that get cold (just got a small amount of frost bite on my toes the other day).
o On top of really thick gloves and socks, can buy some battery-heated versions of both. These aren't just gimmicks, they work wonders! As do the standard handwarmers and toewarmers
o Get real winter boots, these are water proof and insulated, so your feet won't get wet, and will resist the cold for longer (didn't learn this one until recently. Yeah, once your shoes get wet enough to bleed into your socks, you feet start to freeze).
o For your head and neck, carry one of those head and neck covers with you in your coat pocket (called a balaclava). Because sometimes you misread the weather and suddenly you've got a 5 degree wind chill streaming over your neck and face.
o etc:)
And, actually, walking in the snow is really nice (so clean and pure), which is why a lot of us here do actually go outside.
Gloves are not for severe cold. They are for dexterity during limited exposure time - as no gloves can keep your fingers warm for very long no matter how well-made they are.
Look for mittens or "choppers" as we called them back in the day if you are going to be outside for a long period of time. These are outer shells (leather or gore-tex/etc.) with various types of removable liners. You basically layer your hands inside them. For folks outside all day you usually would have a few liners on hand to replace when they get wet.
Add a heat pack (iron oxide) to these on those super cold days and you'll be pretty much set.
Boots that are rated to -40 during light activity can leave you with cold toes if you're standing still in -10 for an hour.
Activity levels also dictate how you layer and how easily you need to dump heat. If you're hiking, snowshoeing, XC skiing, you want some layers with zips so you can quickly let heat out.
all the ones I've seen when researching were lithium-ion from sketchy-looking brands, any brands you recommend?
Your main concern is to stay dry and minimize snow incursion. Either wear ski pants that act as gaiters, use gaiters or use boots and socks that are high enough that you won't get snow down the sides.
If you buy boots with insulation, try not to compress it. Otherwise be aware that if you don't keep moving, your boots will eventually cool to ambient and it's pretty hard to get that temperature back up.
Check grip? Hard to test but warm doesn't necessarily mean any good on slick ice. Spikes work well if you're going on a hike and there's a lot of packed snow mixed with ice.
Don't forget good socks. Doesn't need to be anything fancy, but wool is by far the best material (not necessarily merino as it tends to be too thin). You may need to size up because of the extra padding.
Also luxury, but fan assisted boot drying/warming stations are great. They make quite a big difference if you go out a lot because moisture build-up takes ages to dry otherwise.
Pick a size larger than you would usually do, unless they're explicitly designed as winter boots. In cold weather you'll want wool socks as well as regular socks and that requires some extra space.
When given a choice, soldiers will tend to choose something like Salomon Toundra.
Also, that writing tone is obnoxious.
Everyone I know who drives a lot in the snow gets a vehicle with all-wheel drive and everyone else carries chains. (really they're cables, on a small vehicle)
The difference between what winter-only tires can handle vs winter-rated all-season tires is so minimal that they're not with getting. Chance ate conditions are either fine for the all-season tie or there so bad that the difference is inconsequential and you need all-wheel drive or chains.
I've only heard of people changing their tires on the Midwest, where snowfalls are in the inches, not feet.
FTA:
"If anyone gets an AWD vehicle “for safety” but uses it with all-season tires, they have performed a Consumer Sucka Fail. A front wheel drive vehicle with snow tires would have more grip.
According to this Consumer Reports test (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXjzYbpt9Ow) on snow tires vs. AWD, the tires were by far the most important factor. And only 12% of AWD vehicle owners bothered to put snow tires on their vehicle, meaning 88% of all-wheel-drive vehicle purchases were wasted, because the drivers could have achieved better performance at lower cost in a front-wheeler with snow tires."
You couldn't be more wrong.
The reality of car dependency there means that there are people driving and owning cars who can't really afford to do it properly, nor do they know they need to do it properly (e.g., having a second set of tires for the winter). You can see this evidenced by the rust buckets on the road that look like they are one pothole away from losing part of the vehicle body. Deferred maintenance and investment everywhere and in everything …
Also, you need studs or chains to get traction on ice. The difference between a winter tire and a summer tire is the temperature range where the rubber stays flexible. When the rubber gets hard, it will keep its shape instead of complying with the surface of the road, so it loses traction quicker. Ice is flat, so there's no difference between tire types, and there's nothing to grip on to.
The government has done ongoing research on these subjects and the regulations do get renewed (e.g. some properly rated all-seasons are now allowed)
Beyond the questions of winter weather properties, there are adjacent tradeoffs between the tire types (outside of studded):
1. Fuel economy
2. Noise
3. Degree of particulate pollution emission
I'm sure that the all-season tires probably have some negative tradeoffs in these regards to, which yields a choose the most optimal product for the time of year. All-season tires to me seem like a convenience food for places where the weather can be legitimately bad.
One other difference that is hard to articulate to North American drivers with respect to understanding Scandinavia and roads: there are places where snow and ice will literally not be removed (maybe not even removeable) from the road when plowed (I presume until spring melt). It just becomes a thick ice pack over the course of weeks. I never encountered any roads in my life (including Northern Minnesota) that were this inclement. North American roads tend to be cleared (plowing or melting) to asphalt or pavement.
If tires complying with the standards overlap, then the standards are meaningless. When there's requirements for snow tires, but not for X brand or model of snow tire, than it's not doing any good. That's why it's important to have a snow rating that can apply to tires of any type, and if it meets that rating, regardless of the rating for dry warm weather, than it should be good to go, otherwise not.
All seasons tires are rubbish. Also the "new" ones (re sister comment).
All-season tires have massively improved, but /so have summer and winter tires/. So sure, your all-seasons today may be superior to very old standards for prior generations of tires, but you are still the absolute safest when you have appropriate tires on your vehicle. Tires are fundamentally all that holds your vehicle to the ground.
Also as much as I love AWD, it does basically fuck-all to help in winter conditions. The thing you need to worry about is /stopping/ not necessarily getting going again, and in both cases a FWD car with winter tires is worlds better than any AWD car on all-seasons. I swap to winter tires on my AWD cars when I spend significant time in areas where it snows (e.g. when I lived for several years in Colorado). It doesn't matter how many wheels are used to drive, all vehicles use all 4 wheels to stop, but if you have no traction you are fucked. Anyone telling you otherwise is ill-informed.
Yeah.. no. The difference is night and day.
Put on some Nokian Hakkapeliitta tires and prepare to be amazed. The grip on snow is spectacular.
All the years I lived in snow areas I drove a Miata of all things.. RWD, light, no ABS, no TC, 4" clearance. But with Hakkapeliitta tires I never once had any trouble, while people in their trucks and 4x4s were stuck on the side of the road due to all-season tires. A true snow tire is a whole different level.
> Northern California ... chain controls
The whole California chain thing is brain damage. The proper safe answer to driving in snow is top quality snow tires, not chains. Chains is the worst possible idea. The chain laws are laws created by politicians who live in sunny Sacramento and have never seen snow and have no clue.
A car with Hakkapeliittas (Blizzaks are good too) will outhandle a car with chains 100% of the time.
Chain controls, and really all winter regulations, like snow load factors in buildings and whatnot, are created locally, not by the state. Most politicians are from Southern California, and all the state cares about is air condition efficiency and water usage, as though everyone lives in the desert.
No, this is incorrect. Just try it.
Summer tires are hopeless in freezing temperatures (and are not rated by the manufacturer to be used in such cold), as they become rock hard. As much grip as plastic kids big wheel tires.
Ultimately, what you need the most, is grip. You could have an 8-wheel drive vehicle but if the tires have no grip it will just spin in place.
In the snow by far the biggest advantage comes from true snow tires (not M+S or all season) due to how much grip they'll provide.
A 4x4 is an additional advantage, of course. A 4x4 on snow tires will do better than a 2-wheel drive with snow tires. But a 2-wheel drive on snow tires is infinitely better than a 4x4 on summer tires because if there is no grip, there's no grip.
If you are driving on pure ice then yes, chains or better yet, studs, are the way to go. That is a very rare scenario.
> Chain controls, and really all winter regulations, like snow load factors in buildings and whatnot, are created locally, not by the state.
No, these are state-wide Caltrans rules.
Culture has an impact on what people choose to do. I’ve seen so many Americans with your point of view. It’s maddening. Winter tires save lives!
I’ve shoveled meters of snowfall this year, our roads are just packed down snow, no pavement.
But not all winter tires are made equivalent.
But that said - there are lots of research that points towards that studded tires kill more people than they save lives because of the asphalt particles they cause.
But then there are people that claim that non-studded cars rely on at least 10% cars with studded tires to make the surface more rugged/rough.
Anyway, down the rabbit hole.
If it's snowy a good modern all weather tyre can hold its own, but will brake a few feet later than a good winter tyre.
In all other conditions a good all weather is a lot better than winter tyres, and pretty close to a good summer tyre.
I've driven summer tires, all season tires, winter tires, and studded winter tires in every season in Canada. (Yes, I live in Canada and own borderline-usless summer-only tires. Yes, I've tried driving them in snow.)
None of what you're saying lines up with my own experience, various YouTube videos on braking distances, or literally anything else I've ever seen anywhere.
Edit: And, well, to be clear... I've lived on the West coast of Canada where it's a bit more mild but you're in the mountains, in the middle where it hits -50, and in the East where it only hits -30 but snows like hell.
How much do you drive on snow anyway? Probably nowhere near as long as you do on tarmac, even in a tough winter.
However the difference between winter and a modern all weather (it's a different class) isn't.
And yes, we're probably terrible drivers.
I do not live in Florida. 45N, continental winters.
I'm never using winter tyres again unless society breaks down and no one shovels the roads anymore.
For an all season that level of summer wear would be unacceptable. So a different formulation is used to improve summer wear at the cost of the winter low temp performance. You can’t have it both ways, a long wearing summer performance and good sub 40 degree grip.
Modern high quality all weather tyres are excellent in summer and winter.
Except on actual snow, where they're just ok, because of the hybrid sipe patterns, and ice, where they suck exactly as much as everything else except studded tyres (which suck on tarmac instead).
It's significantly easier. I used to do this in the CA drought where I would fill a bucket when waiting for the shower / sink to get hot, and then use the bucket to fill the toilet after I flushed it.
That article was a strange read from my perspective, because here the infrastructure is built for winters as well. I don't remember school ever being canceled due to winter conditions, traffic is only a mess after a snowstorm.
Seems like the author lives in a rural area where there isn't the support to deal with heavy snow. Also, Finland has frequent snow that falls in small amounts. I'm not sure exactly where the author is, but some mountainous or lake-adjacent areas in the US and Canada the snow falls less frequently but when it does it can come very heavy, like a meter of the stuff in 48 hours is not uncommon which is more than Helsinki usually gets in an entire winter. In Buffalo, NY for example a few years back they got 2 meters in a single day.
I've been obsessed longtime about how (or, better: whether) robots could remove the ice from pavements, but I only see tech challenge after tech challenge.
Warm and humid is a real problem. You can't just remove clothing until you're comfortable. And the humidity.. there's no remedy to fix that.
It's a set of pants and a long sleeve, worn right on your underwear/body. It greatly improves your heat comfort in winter, which I quickly learned the first time out of town in cold with Norwegians. They take it as a given that everyone owns a set.
There's also a hi tech version called superundertøy, which is good at channeling sweat away from body in addition to keeping you warm.
Ullundertøy is very warm. I haven't put mine on yet this winter (only using regular long johns), as temperatures haven't fallen below -15*C yet (and it's been coldest winter so far this decade). But I'd wear it if going outside for longer and planning on staying stationary.
1. In a parking lot, clear behind the car, and just enough to get inside. Then back the car out of the space, clear the car off, clear the parking space out, put the car back in the parking space and clear everything you knocked off. If tried without pulling the car out of the space, you'd be trying not to ding up your neighbor's car, clearing in tight spaces under the car, and then doing it all again when you clear off the top of the car into that narrow gap.
2. Don't drive unless you absolutely need to. You may know what you're doing, but others almost certainly don't. But do make sure to clear out at least one car, just in case there's an emergency.
1. Ice storms. 3 inches (8 cm) of ice build up on trees can cause them to either drop limbs or deadfall into wires. It can be spectacular to see. Sparky.
2. The first heavy snowfall of the year can cause problems because although trees are trimmed every few years, they can grow pretty fast and either arch over the wires or are now tall enough to deadfall on the wires. By the time the later heavy snowfalls have come the danger trees have already dangered. The worst trees for this are the pines and spruces (and hemlocks and cedars but don't tend to grow as tall) since their boughs catch the snow and their new wood is actually pretty weak.
3. Drivers losing control. Doing 20 over the posted limit and passing a plow while the roads are greasy and visibility poor often results in taking out one or more poles while converting yourself into a casualty.
One large factor here is not that it takes a crew long to restore the lines, it's that the problems tend to occur in many sports over a large geographic region. There are only so many crews on shift and more remote places can be forced to wait for days while the townies get services right away. Our power was off one spring for three weeks a few years back after a derecho passed through a strip about 100 miles long by 20 miles wide. I'm still burning the wood for heat.
So, yeah, it's normal. Doesn't matter how good your make your infrastructure, nature is harsher.
It's not the cold that knocks out power, it's the wet and saturated ground and high winds knocking trees into the power lines.
In some places it may be cheaper to dig down the cable than facing storms.
A lineman can fix anything on a pole within a few hours. Probably before lunch if they start first thing in the AM. Fixing a buried line can take days or worse depending on what's above it.
Or if you want to upgrade it. My local electricity provider charges an order of magnitude more for upgrading home electrical service for more amperage if your service line is buried.
I live very near a hospital and suspect I branch off their higher-SLA lines so that may be a factor.
Warmer places that don't experience cold much absolutely suffer during a cold spell. Texas (with its independent grid) has been absolutely wrecked every time it gets too cold.
Yeah, you won’t lose power much. That’s prioritized.
I don’t get as many power outages in the winter as I do in the warmer months (in fall it’s not unusual to have some weeks without grid power). I did however get a freak outage before the last round of storms and cold. The overhead lines coming up the mountain to me have wetlands at the bottom, it appears a sudden extreme drop in temperature caused the wires to contract and tilted a pole enough (before ground could refreeze) to disconnect the lines. This is in NJ. JCP&L/firstenergy utility just does a shit job here.
Less of an issue in areas where people do get around no matter the snowfall tho.
This is very true whether the source of the water is outside or inside your clothing.
Unfortunately, this warning is immediately preceded by the recommendation that you should use rain-gear in winter. A lot of rain gear is very lacking in breathability. If you go out and do something physical in raingear, you will likely wind up drenched in sweat. i.e. Wet. The moment you stop being physical, you will get cold. i.e. Cold and wet. This is a recipe for hypothermia.
For example:
"You did bleach ten gallons of well water for long-term storage already earlier in the year, right? Good."
This is sarcasm, because the author did not do that.
There is some truth in it [that doesn't translate well over to some other part of the works]. It requires rather poor infrastructure to be present.
There has been snow for over 2 months here, with relatively low lows (-29C) but no issue like lack of electricity or water.
For our new home we're making we have two toilets (always practical). One of them is tankless, but we made sure the second one is a traditional cistern toilet with no electrical requirements. Just in case.
In the USA most residential toilets are tank type and don’t directly use electricity.
(And yes - I, too, learned that the hard way.)
I feel like this trick has saved me from catching a cold on quite a few occassions.
Mittens keep your fingers warm while still letting you handle stuff like shovels and grab at things. You can dig through snow in mittens.
Used snowboard boots tend to be fairly water proof, soft enough that you can walk in them, hard enough that you won't stub your toes and are fairly good at keeping the snow out.
Snowboard pants and jackets are both water _and_ wind proof to keep the weather out. They're baggy so your movement is not restricted. They also have a million pockets so you can carry stuff. Jackets usually have a hoodie so you can put on headphones.
When shovelling snow, don't use a shovel. Use a snow scoop. Push instead of lifting. If you have to use a shovel, use something metallic that easily slices through snow, then push them out of the way with the scoop. Don't lift.
Or get a snow blower.
If your city plows your streets, clear the snow onto the streets just as the plower passes by your house. Then you don't have to get rid of the snow yourself.
My best guess is that, because it was a wooden step, the boot print was permanently imprinted into the step itself, and somehow it had filled with water and frozen before the snowfall.
Power going is last thing I would think happens in such place. I understand wind, but snow? I get that rural places might get power cables in the air, but in cities those should go underground.
I live in rural area, close to big city in a semi snowy place (depends on winter), in the last 10 years power went out only when constructions workers cut it out because they had to do some work on them.
This winter we had a power hick up _and then_ a multi day power outage.
> You have a lot of batteries, flashlights, shelf stable food, warm clothes, and drinking water stored, right? Good.
I hadn't. Luckily the power outage was quite local so I could take a bus for ~30min to get to some shops, including ones with flashlights.
Also no propane heater or similar, you don't expect to need it where I live. I would have loved having had it even if just for a bit.
I also had a 1kWh battery.
But some annoying surprise:
- 1kWh is a bad size, to big (but still possible) to nice by food carry somewhere where you can recharge it but too small to use it for a lot of things
- Turns out even if you blanked is theoretically insulating enough to handle very cold temperatures, if it's cooled down, you bed is cooled down, and you yourself are cooled down you need quite a time to warm it up with body head. Doesn't matter that it can handle the temperature or having very warm clothes it will be a huge pain. Having some way (e.g. heat blanked run by battery) to slightly heat up your blanked _before_ you enter it makes an enormous difference when sleeping at ~10C.
- In general learn about winter camping tips they help you if you need to bridge 1-2 days in a very cold apartment. Also having a winter camping sleeping bag can be nice.
-----
The 3rd point is just general good advice, at least skim the manual it might have surprisingly important things in it. And sometimes random but useful tips.
---
> build up and make the fallen snow denser and tougher
fun fact: this is how glaciers are formed, from non melting snow fall pilling up over years and by wight compressing the snow to ice
Someone left theirs at my wife's previous home and she's kept it since. I don't get sore after shoveling anymore. I have a snow blower but only use it when there's more than 6" on the ground.
I've tried other "push sled" style scoops and none of them work this well (and weigh so little).
How does this fare with wet and icy snow?
One day sitting at the dinner table, we heard a giant slide and heard it smash onto the car, and fortunately we found the car keys in my Dad's jacket that night.
We were dealing with -10C to -20C , but as someone else pointed out my takeaway was that it's really your extremities that you need to think about, there rest of my body was easy to keep warm in comparison. I ended up taking a pair of winter motorcycle gloves I had laying around on the trip, water and wind proof and those worked like a charm with an additional pair of thin, inner gloves, so there's a tip!
I didn't quite nail keeping my feet warm though, but I was wearing regular hiking boots with very thick wool socks. Still felt like I was draining heat to the ground at a rapid rate though.
Corollary: don’t buy a house in a place where it snows without two fully independent sources of heat. You want backups. There’s a reason why woodstoves are so popular in New England. A millivolt gas log stove on a thermostat can also be a good alternative.
We have to get our city house roof shoveled, but it is more making certain it don't fall on top of someone.
One thing i keep saying over and over, and few believe me, unless they know from experience - is that winters in Chicago are actually significantly more miserable than Minneapolis, where I went to college.
Minneapolis winters are so cold that everything is dry as a bone, so the cold doesn't 'stick' the same way - Chicago winters sit mostly in the 20-40 range where it's both wet and cold (often raining at a balmy 34-38F), and it's much much more immiserating to be outside.
I have a friend that went to school in Buffalo, NY. That’s a city that experiences “lake effect” snow, during the winter.
He says all the sidewalks are basically “snow gorges,” but the roads clear quickly, and everyone knows how to dress for the cold.
He tells me a story about visiting northern Quebec, one summer, and seeing houses with a second front door, set on the second floor, and was told they were “snow doors,” for deep winter, so folks can get out, when the snow gets deep.
We tend to adapt well.
If it is very cold and no freeze-thaw cycle, the snow is very... Dry and grainy and still OK for shoveling.
But yes, the puffy stuff just fallen from sky is very nice for shoveling.
That's because instruction manuals always have a lot of useless information, and many of them have only such useless information. One of my computer mice came with guidance to avoid prolonged contact with skin and I'm pretty sure nothing in that manual was of any value.
Of course, the really old/good manuals also had schematics, and there were a few cases where those were really help when we actually had to repair stuff like that. For some simpler things that would make sense even today but it ain't happening...
You've happened upon the difference between compliant and capable. See also, any military technology, which costs 10 times the normal price to meet strict compliance requirements, often while completely disregarding capability.
My favorite response to the issue is the AcessiByeBye plug-in (https://www.accessibyebye.org/) which blocks accessibility compliance overlays that make web pages difficult to use with keyboard navigation and accessibility tools like screen readers, but are needed to meet accessibility regulations.
https://newsroom.heart.org/news/snow-shoveling-can-be-hazard...
Solution: don’t be a hero. Take breaks. Take smaller shovelfuls. If the first ten shovelfuls are hard, how hard is the 1000th going to be? I live in Finland, are fairly fit and quite strong, but shoveling the car out of thick snow for half an hour is pretty hard work for me. For an older person, it must be double as hard.
I didn't expect that, though I can't claim to be surprised by the number of elderly people who go to casualty due to falling on ice.
I've lived in several places in New England, some more rural than others. Some places you lose power often, other you don't. Even within the same town. Even if you are not in a rural area. It just so happened where I lived previously, we rarely lost power while friend across town lost it all the time. Many times I loaned them my generator.
I now live in a much more rural place. We lose power more now. Not often, but it happens. Trees fall, cars skid into poles, shit happens. It's good to be prepared. Ver bad things happen to your pipes without heat.
"Lessons you will learn living in a place that doesn't regularly get a lot of snow."
I live in Northern Virginia, and ... DAMN, this has absolutely sucked for the past [almost] three weeks.
UPSs for power outages.
Chest freezer - put those 1 gallon crystal springs (if in western us) jugs in to have ice blocks.
Have warm clothing. If you live in an HOA, be on top of them plowing both common areas and walk ways (mine was supposed to, FedEx/UPS/DHL all let me know - the walkway couldn't be an ice sheet).
Ensure you have access to a vehicle to get your to the services you need.
I live on an island now with a driveway that has 15-20 degree slope. It snows rarely, but garage is insulated and I need to get a heater near the water pipes. It snowed the one day I had to get to the ferry at 650am for jury duty. I'm glad I had the TRD - it wasn't much but waking up to - doo-dee-doo - drive to ferry and unexpected 2" of snow...causes some anxeity.
Another trick to make kindling, take cardboard or old egg boxes or I suppose kindling wood and dip them in molten candle wax / paraffin.
It should frankly be nr 1. At least if you ask any Scandinavian dad.
Haven't gotten around to setting up any alerting thresholds though... I'm not actually entirely sure what temp/humidity thresholds would actually be useful.
This is probably because the average idiot neglects to unplug motors (refrigerator, and other inductive loads), bringing down the network again, entirely unnecessarily.
That's what I did and living on the California coast is much better.
"Anyway, to flush a toilet without a running tank, dump about a gallon of water right into the bowl as fast as possible."
No, ya dork, you fill the tank then flush. There were a few other pearls, but no need to pile on. Anyway, I hope someone finds it useful or perhaps is put off the idea of moving to rustic, romanticized places when they'd be better off elsewhere.
During the day, we'll be somewhere where they have a generator. At night, it's cold. But you can somewhat prepare for this. Two or three layers of duvets and blankets, paired with a hot water bottle somewhere in the middle of the bed under the covers will get you through the night.
Fatwood (on Amazon) is amazing for this kind of stuff. It's much easier to start up a wood stove with a few sticks of it than "sufficient cardboard".
(Que the holier-than-thou folks who admonish anyone who has a wood stove.)
But even that's in the dream scenario where somehow your snow is in a sealed, insulated space. In the real world, snow tends to be outside, in the cold air, which is very eager to sink and replace any hot air you make at ground level. So you're losing any heat that warms the air at all. And all that air in the snow makes it a fantastic insulator, meaning the vast majority of your heat isn't going to penetrate.
Interestingly, this same phenomena makes melting snow from underneath much more effective (as the great insulating snow captures the heat). You still need to grapple with the kinda nuts amount of energy it takes to melt ice, but at least you're not wasting 90% of it.
Not useful for snow as you'll quickly be swimming and out of propane
1. Do what everyone else does, when they do it. And don't, when they don't. You could die.
There is usually a reason even if you don't understand it right now. You don't want to find out why when you're out in the cold and freezing.
2. Buy gear locally.
There's sometimes reason a certain item is on the shelf and not the stylish one from California, or the super heavy-duty one from Norway. Unfortunately, often this is only obvious in hindsight. Does not depend on price, but it does apply across the board from clothing to cars.
I see plenty of tourists with winter gear that is either insufficient, or completely over the top. Whereas if you buy locally you'd generally find the right stuff.
I kind of still believe that story, but as I get older it starts to feel like cope, and the sunny shores of Miami / Spain / Warm Place seem more full of life.
In a way you’re right. All the effort to reduce energy usage, go green, the savings are all negated with energy spent on generating heat and emissions.
Regarding 6, you can't shovel snow fast. It's a marathon, not a sprint. Don't use a regular shovel, there are sled-like contraptions that allow you to push the snow around on the ground and that will allow you to bring it further with less effort. Dress appropriately, you don't want to become too sweaty and you are going to figure out an equilibrium where your heat and sweat production stabilises your temperature, or you're going to have to take breaks and on average get less done per unit time.
Regarding 9, if you don't have an axe, get one. In harsh conditions tools are what keep you alive and things like axes and knives are part of the basic equipment you need to have and take good care of. You do not split the wood indoors, do not bring it indoors unless it is split in small enough parts that lighting it will be easy.
Also, you should really avoid using wood that hasn't had good shelter up until time of use. Moist wood will add a lot of soot to your chimney and you are likely not able to clear it yourself, meaning that you run the risk of a chimney fire.
No, no, no!
Push comes to shovel
If it gets above freezing during the day and freezes again at night, the snow will go through a melt/freeze cycle to become a nice thick sheet of ice. I don't know how many times I've seen a 3 inch sheet of ice go flying off a car traveling 70 mph on the Garden State Parkway. This is common sense and it's infuriating how brain dead people are about this. Incidents have killed people before.
Thankfully I've also seen NJ State Troopers hand out tickets for this. I now live in a state, Washington, where the politicians are too busy grandstanding on stupid issues while ice sheets go flying at cars around on the freeway after a snowstorm.