Ice Station Zeugma

With reports in from Ice Station Echo, Ice Station Delta, Ice Station Sierra, Ice Station Alpha, Ice Station Hotel, Ice Station Bravo, and Ice Station Juliet, I figure I’d best add mine. Here at Ice Station Zebra Zeugma, the snow started late Tuesday night, and I was Staff Duty Officer the next day, which meant I had to be in early. Highland Falls did a wretched job of plowing, so I put on the Matterhorns and went in on foot at about 6:40 Wednesday morning. The snow kept going all day, alternating with some sleet and freezing rain, and I made it home around 4:30 yesterday afternoon with work to do.

Ninety feet of driveway by a swath eight feet wide, plus forty feet by three feet of sidewalk, front and back and porch. Roughly an area of 840 feet. Multiply by maybe six inches of accumulation, not all that much, but it was ugly because it was big dry flaky powder followed by a layer of ice and sleet followed by more powder and then more ice. It’s aggravating wedding-cake snow; each shovelful at somewhere between 3.5 and 4 square feet weighing around 7 pounds-ish, but often more like 9 with the effort of breaking the ice crust. Call it 8 pounds average, with 2 shovelfuls per 6 inches of depth, sometimes 3 because of the crust. And then there’s the stuff the village of Highland Falls plowed up onto my driveway and front walk, roughly 60 square feet of wet and heavy snow at 12 pounds and 4 square feet for every shovelful, but requiring 4 shovelfuls for every 4 square feet. Practically a berm. Overall, 60 square feet of heavy snow plus 780 square feet of light snow, at varying shovelable volumes. All told, a conservatively estimated total of something like 3720 pounds of snow moved via shovel in a bit less than two hours last night.

I’m anticipating some serious Motrin-munching today.