*snerk*

[icepixie]

Hey, Northerners: Here is what you need to deal with your excess snow! Apparently it can double as a weed-whacker. Er, weed-burner. For when you really do have a scorched earth policy.

In a similar vein, I recently wondered why cities don't just collect the worst of the snow and dump it into a convenient lake/river/ocean, but I suppose there's salt and motor oil and whatnot in it that the fish wouldn't appreciate. Though maybe if you could run it through a wastewater plant first or something...

Comments

[icepixie]

Well, our rivers at this point are frozen over.

Meep.

I just googled a bit, and the EPA has made it illegal to dump snow in various bodies of water. But, you know, all our storm drains down here go to the nearest river or lake--and I imagine it's the same up there--so it's not like that snow isn't going to end up there anyway. I wonder what the difference is.

[forsweatervests.livejournal.com]

Good for ice-skating! Generally.

Maybe they're worried about flooding the people right around the bodies of water by dumping all the snow there at once, as opposed to the trickle-melt we get as the sun comes out. It makes the most sense to me, but I'm not sure I get why we can't dump it in the ocean. How many tons of New England snow would it take to flood the ocean?

[icepixie]

I think I would be scared to ice skate on a body of actual water. What if the ice wasn't thick enough? Eeek!

[nickless.livejournal.com]

Three to four inches is what's usually recommended for things like ice fishing, which around here, isn't a problem. We've got lots of places where you can drive your car right out onto the lake 'cause the ice is over a foot thick.

That being said, there are lots of times near the beginning or end of the season when you drive past and comment on the idiots who are out there when it looks way too thin. You see a lot of them on the news, too. And there's no way you'll ever catch me out there!

[icepixie]

ZOMG. Yeah, I've seen Ice Road Truckers (you could not pay me enough), so intellectually I get that you can go out on an iced-over lake and it'll support you, but I'm pretty sure my hindbrain would basically be screaming NO NO NO NO NO NO NO if I ever tried it myself.

(The river downtown does actually freeze over once every sixty or seventy years. For like a day. There are pictures of people going out on it in the 1890s and 1940s, but you wouldn't catch me doing that...)

[forsweatervests.livejournal.com]

That's why they have to be certified, first!