The biggest problem Southern people have in the winter is ice.
A big amen to that! I learned to drive in NJ by NYC and in the finger lakes snow belt in upstate NY in college. Snow is a pain, but easy to drive in if you have a brain. I realize that narrows it down a lot. Most of y’all’s* weather comes from the northwest, occasionally from the East. It’s cold evenly all the time, air gets cold loaded with moisture from either & POW, winter wonderland.
Down here weather predominantly comes from the west/southeast, warm high humidity warm air from the gulf. When we just get weather from the north Midwest, we can get snow. Typically melts in a day or two. But when cold air comes from up north for a couple days, enough to freeze the trees and ground, and then we get warm moist air from the gulf, perfect storm, the moisture in the air and falling rain (not snow or sleet) freezes solid in a second on the trees and on the pavement and ground - instant thick black ice. I don’t care where you learned to drive, you cannot drive on ice.
With that, there are several problems. No one down here knows how to drive in snow, no less on ice. I don’t go out on ice, but I usually don’t go out on snow either. Not that I don’t know how to drive on the snow, but nobody else does, so it becomes a demolition derby.
Most people stay home in the ice. The biggest problem with the ice is that the trees load up on top, the Loblolly Pines, and they snap and fall like a car falling on you. They take down the powerlines when they do it, fall on houses and businesses, and do all kinds of other damage, and the road crews can’t get out on the ice to deal with it. The ice also builds up on the transformers, then the heat of the transformers melts it, and the transformers short and blow all the fuses.
I have a 1500 W converter on the diesel F250, and I’ve wired my downstairs gas furnace so I can swap it over and run it off the truck. Usually turns into a neighborhood party here. I also have a ventless gas fireplace in the master bedroom, with CO detector, and a back up CO detector.
95% of the time, the snow or ice melts in a day or two at most. But it takes the power company up to a week to get all the power back on. I almost got arrested once for using a fiberglass fire stick and replacing the fuse on the pole transformer that feeds my house others. So now my two neighbors stand watch as I do it!
And while I say snowstorms are easy, the reality is I haven’t driven in them in 40 years, and I think I’m just as feeble as the SunBelt folks. All my life I wanted the big fancy four-wheel-drive truck because I was raised in the snow, but now that I have it, I’ll be damned if I’m gonna take it out in front of these folks!!!
Be safe, be warm. Today I have to brave 60 degrees to go vote and save the Nation!
*and a side note for you Yankees: do you know what the plural of y’all is?
“all y’all!!” Be safe!
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