Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Slidin’ Thru The Hollers Like They Do Up North

If I hear another northerner tell me that we hillbillies don’t know how to drive, I’m gonna sit on ‘em and make them eat cornbread without sugar and soup beans with seasoning meat.

It was bedlam this morning. Tens of thousands of dollars in damage to vehicles, and who-knows-how-much in road workers, materials and equipment cost to help clear the roads. And horribly, at least two people who left their homes this morning will never return. And here’s something to consider: There were plenty of fall injuries this morning with broken arms, legs, and hips that will take weeks of recovery.
This morning, east Tennessee had nature’s form of a sneak attack. The streets had been chilled with very low temperatures in the past few days. Then this morning the air temperature hovered around 28 to 30 degrees- just right for ice. The kind of ice that forms in the tiny crevices of the pavement so that it doesn’t make a tell-tale reflection. It’s the kind of ice that can quickly make a road slicker than snot on a Popsicle. And driver’s won’t know it until they look out the windshield and see the headlights of the car driving behind them, and oncoming traffic in their rear view mirror.

It doesn’t matter whether you grew up in Sopchoppy, Florida, Smoky Junction, Tennessee, or Bratwurst, Wisconsin, when the interface between the tire and the roadway is interrupted by a layer of ice, you are going to slide. I saw a videotape of a military tank sliding on an icy road in Germany- a perfect illustration that slick is slick no matter what you are driving. And a northerner was probably driving the tank. If they weren’t, there was one somewhere inside the machine saying “We don’t drive our tanks like this up north.”

There are only so many degrees of incline, decline, or banking in a curve that any vehicle can take when the road is iced over like the inside of a 1950 Kelvinator. In ice- 60 MPH to 0 MPH is the premier performance specification. The only thing I have seen that gives you any help is a computerized system that thinks faster than a driver. Even a driver from up-north.

I’ve heard some reporters this afternoon sound almost hopeful this stuff will re-freeze and cause even more problems tonight and in the morning. Maybe they will find work in Frozen Butt, North Dakota.

Posted by Dave Foulk at 21:24:21 | Permalink | Comments (4)