Friends in Need When Nature Hiccups, Natural Disasters forum Options

[belleraphon1]

Sincerely hope all you UMSFers on the West Coast are OK! Read Emily's blog....
http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00001576/

Widfires and now an earthquake... scary...

Concern from an Ohioan who only worries about getting snowed in once or twice a winter season.

Craig

p.s. With global climate change this forum may get a few posts or two in this century!

[nprev]

Sorry to resurrect this, but seems appropriate. Are all our UK friends weathering this sudden snowstorm all right? Looked pretty miserable on the news over here in the States!

[helvick]

Don't know about the UK but here in this part of Ireland (just west of Dublin) we've had the first proper fall of snow since January 2001. Now that's only about 10cm which I'm sure anyone used to proper winters would laugh at but we really aren't kitted out for this here, roads are treacherous and we have no snow plows, nobody has adequate tyres for icy conditions and the airports\trains\buses are all grinding to a halt. It's not actually all that cold - -2 to -5C, we had a couple of much colder snaps just before Christmas but they were dry so provided folks have made it home it's not really all that bad. Things are a lot worse in the UK though to be fair.

My main worry is that I'm supposed to be heading off to sunny Madrid later today for a few days teaching the folks in Dell about some of their cool new toys and I was really looking forward to it but it seems there is a risk that Dublin airport is likely to be shut down and I may not escape.

[Tesheiner]

<snip>
My main worry is that I'm supposed to be heading off to sunny Madrid later today for a few days teaching the folks in Dell about some of their cool new toys and I was really looking forward to it but it seems there is a risk that Dublin airport is likely to be shut down and I may not escape.

Sunny Madrid eh?!? Here're a few pictures.

The first one is from sunday morning and the remaining ones are from the 9th of January. It's not uncommon to see some snow falling in the Madrid area at least once in the winter. But THAT amount is really out of the scale, specially the storm on the 9th. Madrid's airport was closed for hours, schools closed too, and the traffic jams on the main highways were really huge. I was in Germany part of the week and that day we were supposed to fly back to Madrid but the chances were slim due to the delays and finally no way once Barajas (Madrid's airport) was closed. We would have to spend the night in Frankfurt but finally decided to take a flight to Zaragoza (300km east of Madrid) and make the final leg by train because the railway network was fine. In a normal situation a would be at home at 7pm but that time I was back at 4am.