The weather forecast hits the airwaves or the Interwebs and it’s calling for either ice or snow and just as certain as death and taxes, you can expect that the Raleigh-Durham area will lose their collective minds over what’s likely to happen.
We usually call it a Snowpocalypse on this side of RDU but I’ve recently heard of our friends in the Bull City past the airport refer to the impending meteorlogical disaster as a Durmageddon.
Either way, the store shelves will be emptied of water, bread, milk, and curiously enough eggs and bacon even though if the power goes, you’d better hope you’ve got some way to keep them safely refrigerated and a grille available when you’re ready for them.
The forecast can call for a dusting or 20” of snow and it will not stop the run on the grocery store shelves and people trying desperately to find a gas-powered generator.
There is a method to at least some of this madness considering that the part of North Carolina that isn’t the mountains are usually ill-equipped to handle anything wintry so you know if there is something significant coming down and sticking, the roads are likely to be a mess for days on end.
I’ll give DOT credit…they try really, really hard not to do stupid things to the roads in spite of not really having the budget for dealing with winter like they do in Minnesota because the bad years are relatively few and far between.
That said, sometimes one wonders what they’re thinking when they’re dropping salt brine on the roads when the forecast clearly shows the Triangle won’t get a whole lot of precipitation or if we do, it’s straight-up rain that washes the salt brine away.
But if it’s a big snow event, they’ll plough off the snow that gives you traction you can drive on in favour of an ice rink on the roads that NHL players would rate as acceptable that you can’t because of lack of a coefficient of friction.
That’s why I’m generally backing the Traverse into the garage when the event starts and I’ve no desire to move her again until whatever is coating the roads is mostly gone.
Then there’s the schools who can’t win no matter what they decide to do but at least they seem to be faster at making a decision than they have been in the past when they’d wait until 0500 to pull the plug on school for that day.
Wake County has a sprawling unified county-wide school system and they’ve never worked out a way to selectively close and delay the schools in the parts of the county that are actually affected by the weather. Wake Forest might well be getting slammed but our friends in Fuquay-Varina don’t get a flake of snow or any freezing rain at all and yet even the most innocuous winter event invariably leads to school being in the bin completely or delayed a few hours throughout the county for days on end.
And just when you think you’ve got a handle on the chaos round here, there are the years that it seems every other day is a snow or ice event for several weeks in a row.
The Snowpocalypse of 2000 and 2014 (that latter generated many famous memes of catastrophies occurring on a completely snow-covered Glenwood Avenue such as many fires and Godzilla rampaging amongst the stuck cars) were just two examples of this tendency of the area to get a freight-train effect of one storm after the other.
The snow storms we generally don’t mind terribly.
But if you really want to strike fear in the heart of the locals when it comes to winter weather…all you have to do is have a forecast of freezing rain north of 0.10” accumulation. That’s when the truly scary things really start to happen…power lines hitting the deck all over the place leading to long outages at the worst possible time) and roads that are completely impassible but it doesn’t stop the hundreds of fools testing their luck and often calling for the State Highway Patrol and a tow-truck to fish them from where they binned their car on the side of the road.
So even though we’ll be braving the scary weather to see the Alumni Game tonight, in the back of our mind will be the persistent thought wondering if the weather guys got the forecast wrong (again!) and we’ll have a huge Snowpocalypse/Durmageddon on our hands and should we stock up on even more groceries and wonder if the schools will be canceled due to a couple of snowflakes.
