A Lesson In Handling An Ice Storm

Well, I learned a little lesson this week: when there's an ice storm, shovel your walk ASAP.

I'm sure many of you heard about the snow and ice storm that passed through the eastern US. (It was the same system that sent a tornado through New Orleans.) Where we are we pretty much got ice, sleet, and freezing rain. A little over an inch of it. Pretty stuff, but a pain in the ass to deal with.

Tuesday night the storm hit us. We had worked late and got home to find the front walked lightly glazed with ice. I sprinkled a little salt for traction and we went inside for the night. I stayed up late that night, listening to the ice ticking against the skylights, and against the front window once the wind kicked up. Fascinating stuff for a guy from New Orleans. I watched as it piled up on the deck rails - our standard means of measuring snow and ice accumulation from inside our warm home. It was quite impressive, with all the ice granules and the icicles hanging down.

The next morning I started shoveling the walk. It was heavily crusted with grainy ice and the bottom layer was pretty solid because of the salting I had done the night before. I got the step mostly done when the shovel broke. It's a plastic scooped snow shovel with a metal edge riveted on. It cracked where the wood handle attaches, which means it's now good only for pushing loose snow and ice chunks, but is not rigid enough to hack at the solid stuff. We resorted to salting again fro traction and going on in to work. Wearing LL Bean "duck" boots our heels crunched into the ice pretty good and gave us enough traction to get by.


By the time we got back, late again, the ice was frozen solid enough, if still granular, to support us without breaking. That meant we we free to slide across it if we didn't step right, so out came the salt again. We had brought the shop shovel home, but I was tired so I didn't do any shoveling. It was too cold anyway.

This morning I went out to the shed and got the spade, figuring that would make short work of breaking up the ice so it could be easily scooped away. No such luck. The ice had solidified somewhat, but was still grainy and in the shady places where it hadn't melted so much tended to not come up in chunks. Eventually I worked out a technique of chopping straight down into it about an inch or so from the edge. If I chopped clean through to the concrete the ice would usually break off in chunks. Finally I finished, put a little salt down on the more stubborn parts, and back to work we went. Man, my toes were cold.

It would have been much easier had I shoveled it all that first morning.