Freezing rain musings for people who don't get "that kind of weather" where they live

This is the third day of school that's been cancelled due to freezing rain since November. Last year this happened too. "Cancelled" means "the buses aren't running, kids who walk to school can come if they want. This usually means I go in (living 15min drive from there) and hang out with a couple of other teachers who've showed up too, and tidy my desk and stuff like that. 

     This storm went all night from early yesterday evening, and ended up resulting in a quarter inch of hard ice coating everything like the candy shell on an M&M. The thing about the danger of ice is that, if you look out the window, things don't look very unusual, only perhaps a bit shinier, or "wet" looking. When you get outside, however, you see what's going on. I'm sure most people have walked around on a skating rink, in which the ice is uniformly smooth and completely level. It's quite different when it's in irregularly smooth patches and downhill. 

     I managed yesterday evening to walk a block to the pizza place for a slice without falling, but it got worse throughout the night. Wouldn't have managed it this morning when I put the garbage out and decided not to try walking around on the sidewalk anymore, for fear of suddenly sliding downtown. 

     Obviously, so long as rain is falling down from warmer air in the sky, and then freezing when it hits anything slightly colder at ground level, there's nothing much anyone can do to make it safe to walk around or drive. I'm told car tires with metal nobbies on them used to be made, (or chains laced around the tires) but that kind of thing damages the road surface, so isn't legal. If you toss lots of salt on the ice, the salt will dissolve into it, and, as salt water requires a much lower temperature to stay frozen, it will appear to slowly eat through the ice like acid. Obviously, the town sends out trucks and sidewalk equipment which toss a mixture of salt and sand while trying to scrape the ice off the roads with big, friction-sparking blades, but this is slow, dangerous work, as the vehicles drive on unsalted road surface while flinging salt behind and to the sides. 

      Several times I have been driving at night behind a slow-moving snow plow, and have impatiently decided to pass it. You hit the gas, pull into the passing lane, unable to see any of the yellow lines or the edge of the asphalt because of the snow lying on the road, and you get snow and/or snow/salt flung all over the windshield, and as you draw level with the vehicle, suddenly the road gets a whole lot more slippery, as it hasn't been plowed and salted yet, like the surface right behind you has. When I was learning to drive, I twice ended up exceeding the speed limit on the wrong side of the road, facing backwards with a snow plow gaining on me from behind, visible out the windshield. Didn't hit anything either time. I am not privy to what either plow operator thought as he or she cruised by my car, sitting in the ditch, buried in snow halfway up the doors. 

    One of the wierdest things I have ever seen while driving was in heavy, slowmoving highway traffic, when a huge old car suddenly, majesticly lost control and starting turning in giant, slow, graceful circles while still sliding forward in its lane right in front of me. I wasn't going very quickly, so I just slowed down a bit more until it slid off the side of the road. Looked like a big metal figure skater, though. 

     My apartment is at the top of a hill, and my sidewalk and parking space are therefore dodgy options when the ice is everywhere. Freezing rain is much rarer than snow or rain (or sleet) because the temperature has to be just right for it. If the rain freezes on the way down to the ground, it's "ice pellets" which are slippery as spilled beads to walk on, but don't coat things or adhere together. If it doesn't freeze at all, it's rain. If the water condenses into air that is below freezing temperature, it crystalizes and forms snowflakes. So, for freezing rain, you need it to start out as rain rather than snow, but not freeze until it hits things like car windshields. 

     My car windshield right now looks exactly like a smoked-glass or pebble-textured glass window in a church. If I let the heater in my car run for about 15 min before trying to scrape the ice off the windshield so I can see while I'm driving, it will start to come loose, stuck to the windshield with a thin film of water between, instead of bonding to it like glue. 

    One time in high school I had my Dad's car, and no ice scraper, so I had to run the car heater and scrape ice off the windshield with plastic cassette tape cases, which tended to shatter. I have a permanent scar on a knuckle from scraping off my windshield and having a jagged piece of ice cut through to the bone. That's pretty rare. I wasn't wearing gloves. 

     These days off are called "snow days" even though in southern Ontario we almost never suddenly get so very much snow that our snow removal equipment can't deal with it. They are almost always "ice days," really. You can't deal with ice that coats everything (including trees and powerlines) nearly as easily as you can snow. 

     In 1998, freezing rain fell for a week. Powerlines and hydro towers snapped and folded in half, portable generators were used for people who heated their houses electrically in rural areas, the army went door to door making sure everyone was ok (what a great use for an army!) and so on. I lived in Ottawa, where the power was only out for a couple of days, and we heated with gas, but people in rural areas had no power for as long as 13 days. A lot of cattle and chickens and so on froze to death and had a coating of ice on the piles of their corpses. The ice out there has become less like glass and a lot more like moist Swiss cheese.