Yep, that shiny stuff is ice. We drive on solid ice for half the year. I've had my share of problems, sure, but somehow I've managed to drive my one-wheel drive truck around town for 4 winters. For me it's easier to drive through town after a fresh snowfall, than a fresh plowing as in the above pictures. Eventually though, the Sun God prevails, and the phenomenon known as "BREAKUP" begins.
Breakup is not a pretty time period. The streets often flood as filthy water carrying all the garbage thrown out of car windows, all the settled pollutants, and all the pet piss and crap for six months tries to find it's way to the sea by collecting in the street. It doesn't go anywhere because the storm drains are all frozen over. I mean seriously flooded, as in if you had a Honda civic you might need to worry. Plus it's a flood ontop of ice, which is actually kinda cool.
So the city has to begin a chain of events. The first thing they do is plow the streets extra wide. A plow can only "plow" snow so high, so what happens is that after each major snowfall the street gets a little narrower. When it gets too narrow, or when spring arrives, they use a different method. They plow the snow from the sides of the road into the middle of the street, making a 3 foot ridge called a "burm". If you happen to be going down a neighborhood street and encounter a snow burm in the road that stretches for blocks and blocks, it can be pretty inconvenient, since you can't turn left. Then a specialized machine comes by that "eats" the snow from the middle of the road and shoots it into the back of a dump truck that is slowly driving next to the machine. There are usually 3 or 4 dump trucks in a line so that as one dump truck is filled it departs and the next one immediately takes it's place. It's a pretty efficient operation and can occur at any time of day.
On major streets, or in neighborhoods that have rich people, they still have to solve the problem of the frozen over gutters. So they have another specialized truck that comes by. This one is full of water, and has a gun attached to a hose. The operator of the gun shoots piping hot water into the snowbank carving a niche through the ice until the drain is exposed. I don't know for sure how they know exactly where the drain is but once a tiny hole is exposed, the erosive forces of water quickly widen it and the flood drains away.
The city doesn't car about most neighborhoods, and leaves ordinary citizens to fend for themselves. Although flooded streets can be fun to drive through in a big truck, they are not so fun if it's in front of your house. That brings me to our house. The only storm drain on our street is in front of our house, meaning our house is the lowest point. Not good when there is several feet of frozen water in everyone's yard. So it's up to me and my bad ass neighbor to hold back the floodwaters and save our lives. OUR LIVES!!
O.k. so, when it comes time to save our lives, my neighbor Rick and I, whoever gets there first, has to find where the heck the storm drain is. Last year I quickly found it through the use of my excellent spatial memory by pouring boiling water through the snow. My first attempt was off by only a couple of inches. I think Rick was jealous, because this year he got out there before he even needed to and found it with a hammer and maul. Streets, if you haven't noticed, are often made with a convex shape to them, so that water rolls off to the side. Ice, however, is water, and flows downward with a level top, just like water in a bowl. That means that on a street with a convex shape, the ice is much thicker on the sides than in the middle. This year I decided to measure how thick the ice was in front of our house, since it was depressingly thick.
It's hard to see in the picture, but it was 10 inches thick. Getting the gutter exposed doesn't help the flooding however, if the water can't get to the gutter. The next task is to hack a channel through the ice from the floodwaters to the drain, so that they will empty into it. This is a messy job, and wearing goggles of some sort is advisable, since the water is full of the aforementioned pollutants and has a tendency to splash up into your face and onto your clothing as you hack through it to the ice underneath.
With a canal established, the floodwaters quickly drained, fresh asphalt is revealed. Skateboarders would soon be skating their asses off in 50 foot pathes of bare pavement.
Seeing bare asphalt is a very uplifting experience but it would be weeks before the ice was gone. The canal was established on March 26th. The picture below was one week later on April 2nd.
There was an incredible amount of melting that week, even though we got fresh snow. In that picture you can trace the history recent geologic events through the different layers visible in the ice in front of our driveway.
This picture, and the one below, are after the passing of another week, taken on April 9th. After a few weeks of melting the ice in the middle of the street is gone, but water from the sides melts channels under the ice and builds up in pools that usually can't penetrate the ice directly in front of our house. Instead it works its way through our yard and floods our driveway, forcing me to go out there twice a day with a bucket and drain the huge puddles. So at this time my neighbor and I axe another path, straight along the gutter on the side of the road, to divert the water. It's amazing that you only need a very narrow path, really just a crack of pavement showing, and in no time at all the flowing water widens the channel to something more practical. The ice is still up to eight inches thick making it a good but fun workout.
Finally, by Easter, with the arrival of rain on a few days that really helped out, I considered the ice defeated at last. WHOOHOO!!!!
