Munki Bhoy wrote:All this talk about not being able to handle snow because it doesn't happen often would be fine... If we could handle rain. Idiots can't drive in it, flooding happens all the time (localized and otherwise) and we get rain all the time!
And we can manage rain normally which is why since roman times roads have been built with a camber. I could even draw a cross section of a roman road but I shan't. And since the Victorian times we have had drains to take the excess water away. Most of the time this is not a problem but when there is an exceptionally high volume of rain, those systems can fail as any system can in extreme conditions. In this instance extreme is defined by what the systems to deal with it can handle. I was on holiday in the Carribean once and a bridge had been washed away due to heavy, torrential rain. When pressed for details we were told it rained non stop for 3 whole hours and their system wasn't set up to deal with that much water.
It's all relative I tells ya. It comes down to cost of increasing infrastructure copeability vs likelihood of it happening. If we did have a system in place to deal with the sort of snow that happens 5 times per century, then the time we get the snow that happens every 50 years and we can't deal with it we have the same argument.
I'm always reminded of the 3000 hulled oil tanker on futurama that hits an iceberg. "Those fools, if only they'd built it with 3001 hulls!"
chrismoyles.net
Might change my mind after the drive to work in the morning but for now i am happy.
