Major Cold Snap

About five inches of snow have fallen in the last few days

February is turning out to be winter packed into a single month here in southern Ohio. We haven’t had much snow until now, but a lot of recent snow and record lows have made it a challenging few weeks. Tomorrow morning the temperature is pegged to fall to -13, with wind chills approaching 30 below. Already this morning, a temperature of -6 set a new low for Cincinnati beyond what was reached in 1936.

I went out to shovel snow from the driveway last weekend, with the temperature at about 2 degrees above zero. It took less than half an hour for my face to go numb. When I came inside, I asked Mrs. SR013 to feel my chin – it was like a block of ice. You have to be especially careful driving in this kind of weather, because even a fender-bender could turn into a life-threatening situation.

Winter Update

The forest behind our house
is looking pretty wintry

Snow flurries today. It’s like being inside of a snow-globe – big flakes swirling around. Cold, too. (Click on photo to enlarge.)

Of Ice and Spend

We haven’t had much snow this winter, but it has been very cold at times, cold enough to freeze one of our sumps.

In my experience, sumps are not that common in California, because there isn’t enough ground water there to make them necessary to protect a house foundation. Here in southern Ohio, though, sumps are common, a) because there are a lot of basements excavated into the ground, and b) because frequent rain saturates the ground and makes removing the subsequent water from around the foundation highly desirable. You don’t want to come home and find your basement flooded.

A sump is basically a low point into which water drains. And then you need a pump in it to get rid of the water that collects there. This raises an interesting question, though – what if the power goes out? The pump doesn’t work. And of course, that’s likely to happen during a severe rainstorm, when ground water floods into the sump. There are various solutions to his issue, but the one we have selected is to have backup pumps run by a powerful marine (boat) battery. If the water level in the sump gets high enough during a power outage, it will trigger the backup, battery-powered pump, and the water will still be pumped through pipes out into the forest in our back yard.

But there are other issues, too. We have two sumps. Unfortunately, one of them is located outside, which makes it susceptible to weather, including freezing. And this year, it did. We knew because we could hear the pump laboring constantly – it can’t pump water through a frozen pipe – and yet the water level in the sump didn’t go down. I used a hair dryer (at some risk for electrocution) to melt the ice around the pump, but unfortunately the exit pipes leading from the sump were also frozen solid, so the pump still didn’t work.

And so our plumber came over. We are certainly doing our part to keep this guy in business, but anyway, he helped remove some ice from the pipes. And then we simply had to wait for warmer weather, so that the rest of the pipes would thaw. Luckily that happened within a couple of weeks, and the pump started working again.

The system of sumps/pumps that we have cost a couple of thousand dollars, when all is said and done. It’s worth it, though, for the peace of mind of not worrying if the basement will flood during every rain storm or snow storm. But even so, it’s not foolproof. The batteries for the backup pumps could die. Then we’d be screwed. So you have to check the monitoring lights on the batteries from time to time to make sure they’re still charged.

*Sigh* Maintenance.

The Cost of Government

I’ve noted before how the large number of of local government jurisdictions in Ohio – counties, townships and corporations (cities) – makes for inefficient and expensive government. Now an editorial in the Cincinnati Enquirer has taken note of the issue, pointing out that “most of those governments have (separate) administrative staffs, and many have their own police and fire departments, road crews, equipment and buildings to maintain. It’s often not the most efficient way to run government.”

The article notes that in Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati, there are 100 fire stations across all jurisdictions. “In comparison,” the article says, “Montgomery County, Maryland, which has roughly the same population density and is slightly larger and more populated, has just 40 fire stations. There’s no evidence that people in Montgomery County die from fires or strokes twice as often as people here.”

The article goes on to say that one of the prime reasons for the status quo is that “residents like the idea of having services like police and fire as close to their houses and businesses as possible, even as they grumble about high taxes.” I’d add that another, perhaps more important, reason is that it’s not in the interests of the people running the local jurisdictions to threaten their own jobs by merging or consolidating services.

And thus it’s safe to say that there won’t be changes any time soon.

The Coywolves Are Here

And it’s not good news for pet owners – large wolf/coyote hybrids that developed north of the Great Lakes region have been steadily moving south in recent years, and have been spotted around Cincinnati. Coywolves are a cross between western coyotes and the Eastern Red Wolf. Some experts refer to them as eastern coyotes, but they’re significantly larger and huskier than western coyotes, and have reddish fur tinges. More significantly, they have different hunting behavior: unlike coyotes, coywolves hunt in packs, and thus are able to hunt deer (which coyotes do not). Ohio’s deer population is exploding, creating a savory incentive for coywolves to steadily expand their range.

Coywolf (courtesy Eastern Coyote Research)

We’ve seen them on a couple of occasions, including one time when we saw a pair working in tandem to try to bring down a deer. One coywolf chased the deer toward another coywolf that lay hiding nearby in tall grass; the second animal sprang up and joined the chase when the deer approached. That time, the deer escaped. Those coywolves looked more like husky, reddish German shepherds than the thin, scraggly coyotes we saw on many occasions in California.

Southern Ohio needs a natural predator to reduce the local deer population, for sure; human hunters kill many, but the overall deer population is expanding anyway. Still, I worry about our dogs, particularly our Brittany spaniel; with her smallish size and snow-white fur, she couldn’t stand out more to a predator if she had a target painted on her back.

Welcome Home

Welcome Back

Nothing like coming back from a short trip to find waterlogged carpets and water dripping from the ceiling in the basement. Turns out a water pipe froze and burst during our latest cold snap, spraying water into the ceiling for who knows how long.

With holes cut in the drywall, and eight fans and two dehumidifiers now going 24/7, the water damage experts called by our insurance company say it will take 3-5 days to dry out. Then more drywall needs to be cut, replaced, replastered and repainted. They say the carpets in this case are salvagable.

One thing about Ohio is that burst pipes and flooded basements are fairly common. There are a lot of companies around that specialize in drying them out and repairing them.

Aren’t we lucky.

The Ice Storm

We are getting a new (to us) and particularly treacherous storm tonight: ice pellets, also known as freezing rain. It consists of BB-sized, spherical ice crystals that rain down and collect like snow. When the wind picks up and pushes them against the window, it sounds like handfuls of beads are hitting the glass. This precipitation is much more slippery than snow, though, and if it melts a little and then refreezes, it turns into a slick sheet of ice. We are expected to get about 4 inches of this stuff tonight.

Aside from making roads nearly impassable, the ice collects on power lines and tree branches, and can overload them and make them snap. Here in southwestern Ohio, temperatures are expected to stay well below freezing for several days, which means that power lines will be in jeopardy for at least that long.

What fun.

The Temperature Just Keeps on Fallin’

We have had record snowfall this year (more than 20″) and near-record low temperatures. Even so, the next two days are going to be the coldest of the winter so far. Tonight’s temperature is expected to fall to about -10, with the wind chill down to -20.

There’s no way you can adjust to temperatures like that. Even the locals are shaking their heads.

-6 and Falling

That’s the temperature tonight. And with the strong breeze, the wind chill is down to -25. So I went outside to see what it was like. These are the coldest temperatures I’ve experienced since I was a kid in Anchorage, Alaska.

I bundled up, of course: heavy jacket, scarf, knit hat, gloves. It was clear outside, with a crescent moon. Beautiful, really. Still, I noticed right away that although my upper body was well protected, the cold came right through my jeans almost like I wasn’t wearing any. And as I stood there breathing in the cold air, I could feel it in my mouth and part way down my throat before my body heat warmed it.

From the dark forest came weird cracking, crackling noises. Tree branches giving way in the extreme cold? Some sort of night critter out there causing things to shift around? I couldn’t tell.

I came back inside and put another log on the fire. Nice to have that option in weather like this.

Brrrrr!

Our bird feeders after the recent snowstorm

Some very cold weather is moving in. The National Weather Service is using phrases like “life threatening” and “coldest temperatures in 20 years.” The high on Monday is predicted to be -1, with the wind chill pushing that temperature down another 10 degrees or so. Tuesday will be almost as bad before we see warming into the very-welcome mid-30s on Wednesday.

This will be the coldest weather we’ve seen since moving here from southern California more than three years ago. Still, around the house and yard, even Canada-worthy temperatures like this can be managed, and comfortably so, with the proper wardrobe – gloves, scarves, heavy jackets, insulated boots and so forth.

It’s a lot dicier when you drive somewhere, though. You could spin out, or get stuck in a traffic jam caused by someone else who spun out. And that could mean a lengthy chunk of time exposed to the elements. So you have to drive with extreme care and be sure to carry emergency supplies like water, windshield scrapers, knit hats and the like. And hope for the best.