Right but surely you can see how if this is a once in a generation storm for this area, it wouldn’t make much sense to have Michigan infrastructure? It costs a lot of money to maintain all of that. They didn’t let it get so icy because they wanted to or they didn’t care… they don’t have the resources here to prevent that. And what resources we do have were also desperately needed by the entire east coast, because the storm reached as far south as Georgia and as far north as Massachusetts. So there wasn’t enough salt to go around.
I’m not so much disagreeing with anything you’ve said, just expressing frustration at the lack of preparedness that Maryland and VA had with this storm. Its not like having the necessary resources is impossible. It’s all about the funding to private businesses that specialize in snow and ice removal.
In my job, we had a client come in who used to own a plowing business in the 80s and 90s here and he said that what he had seen this winter was a joke. He would have his people parked at the malls an entire day in advance to salt it and they would stay there until it was plowed.
Anecdotal example, but given how the entire state looked for the past month, I think he made a good point.
I will be 46 in a short time and have experienced only a handful of ice storms in my life. That literally was a once in a generational storm where the forecast called for a 1/4'' of ice and then we all woke up to an inch of ice followed by 3 weeks of temps that never got out of the 20's. There was no way for the state or any local office to be prepared for that at all. Frustrations aside, there was nothing anyone could do except bring in crews of temp labor and have 500 shovels and skid loaders for days.
Our history shows that the snow won't hang around that long. Besides the 4' we got in back to back storms in 2010, this is the longest I remember seeing snow still on the ground at the depth it was when the storm passed us by. We had 8'' of snow covered in an inch of ice on the ground for 3 weeks.
2010 was insane, there was that and then sometime around 2005 or 2006 we had something similar to the snowcrete. I remember bc I was a child and I could skate over the ice layer in my snow boots without breaking through. But this storm was the same and I weigh easily twice what I weighed at 9 years old lmfao
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u/Tempyteacup Feb 22 '26
Right but surely you can see how if this is a once in a generation storm for this area, it wouldn’t make much sense to have Michigan infrastructure? It costs a lot of money to maintain all of that. They didn’t let it get so icy because they wanted to or they didn’t care… they don’t have the resources here to prevent that. And what resources we do have were also desperately needed by the entire east coast, because the storm reached as far south as Georgia and as far north as Massachusetts. So there wasn’t enough salt to go around.