Yeah but, you could buy one of these for your wife's birthday.
Posted on 01/11/2012 5:51:58 AM PST by thackney
An Alaska community blitzed by nearly 15 feet of snow was hit by another storm Tuesday and a new problem -- a shortage of shovels.
A spokesman for the city of Cordova said officials had tried Anchorage, Fairbanks and other cities and finally turned to a manufacturer for a special order.
"It's ironic, isn't it? The state of Alaska -- you'd think they'd be ahead of the game. It's those logistical things you just don't plan on, or you don't think is going to be an issue," said Allen Marquette by phone from the city on the east side of Prince William Sound.
The snow-weary city of 2,200 was promised new shovels to be manufactured Thursday and delivered two days later -- but it will be too late for the "couple more feet" of snow that touched down Tuesday, accompanied by winds of 25 to 40 mph and gusts to 55.
(Excerpt) Read more at adn.com ...
thackney - funny how sometimes a moment like the one you described stays with us for a lifetime. Great story - thanks for sharing.
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After a ridiculous amount of wasted time, figures of density calcs and such, the Process Chief, who had been silent this whole time, spoke up and said the current snow load on his roof was exactly XX.X lbs/sq ft and he wasn’t concerned (less than half of what should have been close to a limit).
We turned to him and said how do you know that?
He said yesterday he used a shovel, cut off 6” x 6” of snow, put it into a bucket and weighed it.
Sometimes engineers just make it hard. It’s our nature.
Valdez gets about 287 inches per year of snow with a max of 550.
http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/cgi-bin/cliMAIN.pl?ak9686
Cordova isn’t that far away, but they get about 117 inches per year of snow with a max of 261.
http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/cgi-bin/cliMAIN.pl?ak2177
This recent storm brought 42 inches of snow to the town. They didn’t get it all at once.
It has been surprising how that thought process has saved many, many hours over the decades.
414 inches since October 1st at Alyeska (Girdwood)
I’ve done a few projects with my Mechanical Engineer-Check that, University of Michigan Mechanical Engineer Brother in Law. One of them, he made so complex that to replace the bathtub plumbing fixture would have required removing a floor joist in the basement to do it his way. Finally, after listening to him drone on about how to do it, I said “just how many tub valves have you installed?” He replied “None.” I told him that I’ve done about a dozen of them and it’s time for him to get out of the way. In about 3 hours we were done.
Just gives Obama another excuse - not enough shovels!
I miss a lot of things from Alaska, cleaning snow out of the driveway isn’t one of them, not even with 8 hp, track driver blower I had.
Yeah but, you could buy one of these for your wife's birthday.
That's not a snow blower. This is a snow blower:
I believe they still use one of these in Alaska.
It'd likely be best to just build a snowshed for the driveway.
20 feet of snow and no place to shovel it!!!! and I though 36in in 3 days was bad
Ski Areas off of I-80 in the Sierra have some huge banks by Spring.
Never been up that far in the winter, june lake in the spring and tahao in the summer. the 36” was in northern Mn in 1991, drifts were oh 6-8’ high
June Mtn. is fun.
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