Scot Lehigh was bitching and moaning about Mayor walsh today like a true soft handed elitist because all the snow hasn’t been removed yet. (Really, between you and I he’s just one of many local “journalists” who wish him to fail and are waiting for opportunities to knock Walsh because he beat their guy)
So during his usual unimaginative and longwinded column today he spits this out:
Granted, we’ve had a record amount of snow, but it hasn’t been of the heavy, high-wind-driven, impossible-to-keep-up-with, Blizzard of ’78 variety.
Scott, were you here in ’78? We had 27 inches in a day and a half. Lots of wind and yes it was heavy snow. But the state closed down for two weeks. Two straight weeks of snow days followed by the February vacation. Three starlight weeks.
The National Guard was called out to help remove the snow. BTW Why did it take Charlie so long to order Guard and ITS EQUIPMENT to help out?
Coastal flooding caused much damage in the usual neighborhoods and some others. Unfortunately 40 plus people died in their cars on 128.
And no deliveries, remember? Shelves were bare a good week and gradually came back. There was no milk, no bread, no ice cream, no toilet paper, no tuna fish, no eggs, no Boscoe. That storm was like the Depression is to the old folks. After you experience it you want to make sure you are prepared. Thus every storm since supermarkets make a quick score.
So this was 27 inches in 18 hours. It took two weeks before anything was worth getting to.
I’m pretty sure the T closed.
Here we’ve had over 60 inches in 13 days. The first storm was classified as a blizzard. Since saturday we’ve had over 20 inches and we had a big storm in between. We’ve also had blistering cold temperatures the past few weeks. The record books don’t lie about the amount of snow we’ve had.
Now I remember the Blizzard of ’78 being a total shut down of most everything. Why? Because we couldn’t handle 27 inches of snow and the wind and high tide that came with it. But after 36 hours we had clear skies. Different conditions for cleaning up.
Granted wet snow causes more damage but Lehigh is an arse for using the ’78 storm as proof of his lazy argument.
Duh Scot, everyone working the storm has pretty much kicked ass compared to what happened in 1978
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Tell me “journalism” isn’t a joke. Brian Williams is suspended for six months. WTF. The most self-impressed profession (actually inferior comnplex profession) which boasts that credibility and honesty are treating Williams fopar like they would an excessive abuse of travel expenses.
petr says
… is the difference. The Blizzard of ’78 was almost half over before people realized how bad it was going to get: nobody saw it coming. The storm started on Sunday and everybody got up and went to work, or school, on Monday. That’s why they got stuck Monday night.
However much we like to bust on meteorologists now, in comparison it was little more than alchemy back then.
By contrast, every storm this year has been fairly accurately predicted and rated for severity. Maybe not down the total inches of accumulation, but orders of magnitude more accurate, days ahead of time, than in 1978.
jkw says
How does it help the T to know there is snow coming? They can’t cover the tracks to prevent the snow from accumulating. They can’t buy plows when a storm is coming. They shouldn’t need more than a few hours of notice to set up their snow removal equipment. But there is still a limited capacity to remove snow, and they still need somewhere to put the snow if it isn’t melting.
Predicting the storms ahead of time does help with the streets, but only because it means that most people will be off the roads when the snow starts. That lets the plows run more freely and limits the number of people stuck in snow. It does not provide any more space to remove the snow, and it still takes a long time to get a plow through on every street.
petr says
… of a sailboat, you can set your storm sails, put vests, inflatables and flotation devices in ready reach, ‘batten down the hatches,’ dowse any cooking gear, stow anything likely to knock you unconscious when strewn about and plot your course to avoid or minimize the storm.
For the MBTA a whole days notice can allow them to place extra personnel on alert (particularly plow drivers) allocate busses in the event of a subway line failure and distribute various resources like plows, shovels, fuel, sand, salt and extra radio equipment, the presence, or absence, of any one of which can be the difference between people getting to work or not. Furthermore, a planned reduction in service is a chaotic dance of storage space, queueing theory, locomotives that can’t be parallel parked, large hunks of metal (that are inert absent the locomotive), and dedicated personnel all of which needs to be choreographed on a running system.
There’s a lot you can do with advanced notice and the more notice you have the more you can do…
SomervilleTom says
That works if you have storm sails, vest, inflatables, and flotation devices. It works if your hatches can be secured, and aren’t rotted through because they haven’t been painted or replaced in a decade.
The MBTA doesn’t have any “extra personnel”. It got rid of its plows as an “austerity measure”.
I fear you, like too many others, assume that the MBTA is in far, far better condition than it is.
petr says
… but I was speaking, I thought obviously, in the abstract to what could be done in the space between no notice whatsoever and advanced warning.
I have to make that assumption in order to ride it nearly every day — which I do, commuter rail, subway and bus — and will note that MBTA fail didn’t occur in a snowless vacuum: record falls (six feet in twenty days…?) might have had a little something to do with it; we have to ask ourselves to what extent a fully funded system would operate under those conditions — decidedly better than the existing one, but (I very much doubt), at peak operational efficiency or with perfect on-time record. Somewhere, again in the abstract, between the best run system and a rolling fuster-cluck lies the present MBTA.
I still say thank you to the bus driver when I get off the bus and they, mostly, smile in return. So there is hope.
nopolitician says
Everyone wants government to be “lean”. Bare-bones. That is great when things are good, but when you need more, there is no more to give.
By definition, operating at peak efficiency means that you can’t operate any better. There is no slack in the system. You are at 100%, and you can’t give 101%.
People really need to realize this.