Little Bit Snowy Out in Albuquerque

"Wobbles the Mind" (wobblesthemind) 01/01/2019 at 18:46 • Filed to: Snow

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Nice start to 2019.  

MM54 > Wobbles the Mind 01/01/2019 at 18:55

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I can’t imagine the chaos that is the highway when it snows in Albuquerque

BrianGriffin thinks “reliable” is just a state of mind > MM54 01/01/2019 at 19:06

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It’s usually ice and it’s usually shut down from OK City to Arizona. 

Wobbles the Mind > MM54 01/01/2019 at 19:07

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Th ankfully most people were off due to the holidays so the roads were quiet. That said, I still saw more people rear ended, on the side of the road, and k nocked over stop signs than I was expecting. It’s nearly apocalyptic when s chool a nd jobs dont close and there’s a full inch of snow on the roads.

OPPOsaurus WRX > Wobbles the Mind 01/01/2019 at 19:10

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I’m scared. We had 1 snow storm so far and it was in mid October. The last time we went this long with no snow we got BURIED in February with something like a total of 12' in 4 storms

Wobbles the Mind > OPPOsaurus WRX 01/01/2019 at 19:20

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That's frightening!

ITA97, now with more Jag @ opposite-lock.com > MM54 01/01/2019 at 20:39

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It is worse when it snows in Southern NM and El Paso. The only time I saw a true cluster fuck in Abq was the storm in 2006 that dropped 16" over a couple of days. That is a once or twice in a century snow storm, and it completely over-whelmed the ability of the city to clear streets. It took over a week before they got around to clearing many residential streets, and they delayed school starting back up after the break because the school system didn’t have equipment to clear their parking lots (private snow plows don’t exist here). Most

of the time, snow in abq is a few inches it melts completely in not more than a day or two. The city clears and sands arterial streets, but parking lots and residential streets are never normally cleared. For a couple of days, my 02 F-250 (7.3, but only 2wd) was our only transportation because it was the only vehicle with enough clearance to get out of the neighborhood (and only capable of going down the street. Up the incline of the street was a no-go for a couple of days until enough snow melted)

(Bonus content: My 96 suburban partially appears in this picture several years before I bought it from the next door neighbors).

MM54 > ITA97, now with more Jag @ opposite-lock.com 01/01/2019 at 20:55

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That’s crazy snow for the area, I can see how it’d be a total disaster. There’s no way (and no reason for) the cities to have equipment to clear all that out.

Meanwhile when I lived in Erie, PA it wasn’t uncommon in the winter to wake up to a fresh 12-16" any given morning, and life continued normally. I suspect it would be chaos there, though, if it hit 100+ degrees for weeks on end in the summer :)

OPPOsaurus WRX > Wobbles the Mind 01/01/2019 at 21:02

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FTTOHG Has Moved to https://opposite-lock.com > Wobbles the Mind 01/01/2019 at 21:29

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Meanwhile just 90 minutes north ...

There are people literally skiing through my neighborhood:

ITA97, now with more Jag @ opposite-lock.com > MM54 01/01/2019 at 21:40

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Our street only got cleared a few days later because a neighbor was a construction contractor and finally brought his company’s bobcat home and made a huge pile on snow in the middle of cul-de-sac at the bottom of the str eet.

In Las Cruces, snow is usually a few inches and it melts in a few hours, so the city has/had no snow removal equipment . The state plows and sands highways and interstates in town, but the city streets are just left to melt on their own that afternoon the once or twice a year it snows . NM had a snow storm and deep freeze in 2011 that resulted 96+ hours consecutively below freezing in Las Cruces with one day that had a high of 1 and a low of -6. The inch or two of snow turned into an ice sheet in town that didn’t melt. On one of the busiest streets in town, the city’s solution was literally a city employee standing in the back of a pick up truck throwing sand on the str eet with a shovel. I wish I had taken a picture of that.

The prolonged cold happened to combine with a period when the electrical utility had both of their major power plants in the area down for maintenance (it is normally around freezing at night and in the 50's in the afternoon here in the winter, so electricity demand in the winter is’t much , so that’s when they take plants offline and do maintenance .) . They were running one very small plant and buying power on the wholesale market to power the Las Cruces and El Paso area. When the scope of the storm became apparent four or five days out they stopped their maintenance and tried to start getting generating units back online at the two big plants. They didn’t manage to get them going again before it got cold, and everyone learned that power plants in this area weren’t designed to be , nor had engineers even thought about how, to   cold start generating units below 15 degrees of outside temperature.

Once it got cold, there was no more power to be had on the wholesale market and they were unable to start the two big plants because every time they tried to start a unit the instrumentation would freeze before they could get one running. It resulted in a couple of days of rolling bl ackouts for the region where you usually had electricity for about 45 minuets to an hour once every three hours or so. At one point i t got down in the 40s inside the house I was renting at the time , and something like 75 % of buildings in Las Cruces had frozen pipes and subsequent damage. (plumbing supplies were non-existent for a few weeks after). T hey shut down virtually every business and government operation outside of hospitals and law enforcement to conserve electricity. Some parts of the area lost gas service too, as the power outages were long enough for the backup generators at natural gas compression stations to run start running out of fuel (with the refinery and bulk fuel distributor in the region also shut down to converse electricity, so no way to procure fuel in bulk to refuel backup generators).

That was the great freeze of 2011, and the end result was the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission entering a settlement agreement with the El Paso E lectric Company to never again take that much generating capacity offline at the same time in exchange for not fining them into bankruptcy .

Dash-doorhandle-6 cyl none the richer > Wobbles the Mind 01/01/2019 at 21:47

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My Albuqueegian family is with me in the other, less snowy Mexico at the moment. (I know it’s “Burqueno/a/x ) I just wish more words ended in “weegian”

facw > OPPOsaurus WRX 01/01/2019 at 23:11

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Aren’t you in the Boston area? Because I distinctly remember driving through a snowstorm in the wee hours of  11/16 (apparently the state doesn’t put much effort into keeping 128 clear at 2AM, especially when it is predicted to be well above freezing later in the day).

OPPOsaurus WRX > facw 01/01/2019 at 23:21

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I am, Hanover. I don’t think we got anything from that one . Maybe an inch or just rain.

facw > OPPOsaurus WRX 01/01/2019 at 23:29

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Probably got around 3-4 ” in Waltham. I was coming from NYC which got hit worse. Here’s some low quality evidence:

Note that I’m making an illegal right turn (in front of a cop) because the right turn ramp was not cleared at all, to the point where I couldn’t even see where it was in the dark. The car in front of me did the same thing. And the plowed up snow in the intersection shows that while they did get this one lane, they were not exactly hustling to keep things clear (which frankly is probably financially responsible).

FTTOHG Has Moved to https://opposite-lock.com > MM54 01/02/2019 at 00:13

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If you’re not from the S outhwest, it’s easy to forget just how high up much of it is. I’m from PA and I had no idea Albuquerque was over a mile high until I was a young adult visiting on business. Sure it’s pretty far south in the US and arid, but 5300 feet still makes for cold winters and potential for snow and ice . And ABQ sits at the foothills of higher mountains. I now live under 2 hours north of ABQ at 7300 feet and we have over 2 feet on the ground right now. It’s a lot for us and things are shut down while the county catches up on clearing the roads (people were cross-country skiing through my subdivision today), but it happens every few years. Smaller snowfalls are common here. Some of that weather can dip down into ABQ regularly enough that they should be somewhat used to it there. At least enough to avoid total chaos. Occasionally it does fall all the way down south into the valley by Las Cruces and El Paso but it’s rare enough they don’t keep plows ready.

Today in my neighborhood in northern New Mexico:

A more typical snowfall here (this was in November):

We get it often enough that it’s cleared quickly - the next morning: