Preparedness for when

missrlr

I clear the shared driveway, our drive, the footpath in front of our house and all the way onto the road - we are on a hill crossing and have to reverse onto our drive sideways to a hill and up the other hill simultaneously (does that even make sense????) so not clearing the bit of road in front of our drive means we can't get the car on or off the drive. Next door (new and inconsiderate neighbors) cleared their footpath from door to foot path onto the shared bit of the driveway!!!!! After I had cleared the driveway and I was getting into the car!!!!
So I ended up saying - grass verge not good enough for your snow then? The daft one looked a bit cross eyed and carried on til I went up and said "don't put snow where I have cleared, we need to get the car off the driveway: so she replied "you can't drive in this weather" to which I smiled and said "that's the joy of winter tyres" promptly got the convertible (with snow tyres) out of the garage and drove off - with the roof down. Just because I could and she was being obtuse. I was going to use the dog car prior to her stupidness attack and in honesty a rear wheel drive manic sports car is NOT the most sensible driving decision I have ever made, but it was a cracking drive!!! The looks I got were classic!
Winter tyres make so much difference, we use them from October onwards, as even the slightly lower temperatures and increased wet make these a sensible investment.

Oh and another balmy southern inhabitant here!

siegemode

missrlr wrote: »

Next door (new and inconsiderate neighbors) cleared their footpath from door to foot path onto the shared bit of the driveway!!!!! After I had cleared the driveway and I was getting into the car!!!!
So I ended up saying - grass verge not good enough for your snow then? The daft one looked a bit cross eyed and carried on til I went up and said "don't put snow where I have cleared, we need to get the car off the driveway: so she replied "you can't drive in this weather" to which I smiled and said "that's the joy of winter tyres" promptly got the convertible (with snow tyres) out of the garage and drove off - with the roof down. Just because I could and she was being obtuse. I was going to use the dog car prior to her stupidness attack and in honesty a rear wheel drive manic sports car is NOT the most sensible driving decision I have ever made, but it was a cracking drive!!! The looks I got were classic!

Oh and another balmy southern inhabitant here!

Brilliant:rotfl:

I try to keep up with weather predictions from various sites including the weather outlook and space weather. I also look at and take note of nature and this tells us so much. When I predict things most people think I'm nuts but the birds animals and plants tell us loads throughout the year. As to snow clearing, when it snows our cats don't like going out, especially our eldest who's 19. A few months ago I invested in a snow spade. Last year I was out at 1am and again at 3am in my jimjams clearing the patio and path so that the cats could go out and do their necessities. All I had was a broom and the handle broke !! Sure my neighbours think I'm mad, but the cats appreciated it I'm sure. It's better than having a mess to clean up in the morning.

2tonsils

Just found this forecast on the UK stormchasers forum...first update I have I will post it

In Summary this morning's output has come together in their prognosis for next week. The rest of this week will be rather cold but benign away from Northern and Eastern coastal counties where some wintry showers could occur. The South and west will be dry with frost and freezing fog for a while over the weekend. It now looks like an attack from the Atlantic is guaranteed next week as the cold feed is cut off with a spell of rain, preceded by snow on hills moving across from the west early next week. Thereafter it looks like the best hope for coldies is cold zonality and brief Northerlies on the back of passing depressions. It's also not good news for those wanting drier conditions in recently flooded areas as it looks like the return of some pretty wet weather for all again next week.
Martin Gibbs
Radstock Somerset

GreyQueen

elisamoose wrote: »

I fell over in January ( nothing to do with weather was a paving slab) and fractured a bone in my wrist along with damage to my face and teeth.i am at home recovering from an op on wrist due to ligament damage from the fall. All in all it will have been 11 months of pain and inconvenience. So please everyone be careful!

Owwww! That sounds so dreadful. Wrists and ankles are such complicated and vulnerable joints. I hope that your recovery will progress smoothly.

siegemode wrote: »

Brilliant:rotfl:

I try to keep up with weather predictions from various sites including the weather outlook and space weather. I also look at and take note of nature and this tells us so much. When I predict things most people think I'm nuts but the birds animals and plants tell us loads throughout the year. As to snow clearing, when it snows our cats don't like going out, especially our eldest who's 19. A few months ago I invested in a snow spade. Last year I was out at 1am and again at 3am in my jimjams clearing the patio and path so that the cats could go out and do their necessities. All I had was a broom and the handle broke !! Sure my neighbours think I'm mad, but the cats appreciated it I'm sure. It's better than having a mess to clean up in the morning.

My parents have been enslaved for a number of years by two mongrel cats, one of which is a fluffball who resembles a Norwegian forest cat (but has just Heinz genetics) and adores being outside. She got more than she bargained for when she got shut outside one snowy night last winter and it wasn't until about 5 am that Dad twigged she must be out.

He opened the back door, security light came on and the fluffball bounded through the snow and immediately went up to bed to have her belly fur detangled from lumps of frozen snow by her favourite human being. Medicinal tuna had to be applied, I believe...........:rotfl:

Been listening to the radio and looking at online newspapers about the floods and it's grim. Those poor people. An evacuation in the middle of the night in a flood must be ghastly.

Unsurprisingly, the subject of flooding came up again. My hometown (not where I live as an adult) is on the confluence of two rivers and it's centre is prone to flooding when they ride high. Thus far it's OK but with the land sodden, any protracted downpours will have no where to go and that could change in the space of a few hours.

I was thinking about my hometown, which has been in continous occupation as a town for 1400 years, and there would have been some kind of settlement there beforehand, due to the defensible river site.

There is a part of town only a few hundred meters from the ancient centre which has never been built upon in all those centuries because it's a water meadow. Only now it sports an upmarket set of so-called executive homes. I wouldn't buy one of them for love nor money.

I think what we're seeing all over the country is marginal land being redeveloped for housing whereas people would have left well alone in times past. Yes, we have far better water management schemes that people did back in the day, but they weren't daft as used wind-pumps to keep soggy land drained enough for grazing but they didn't try to build towns on the marshes.

I guess that the sensible person will have to have topographic maps, a knowledge of where the watersheds run and some local historical background before making a house purchase in the future. If homes are to be deemed uninsurable as the flood risk is too great, it risks ruining the poor souls who've purchased them.

I've kept an eye on "my" river and she's a bit higher than normal and distinctly muddy but there is plenty of clearance below the bank at the moment. Which is good as if it breaches the bank, it will be straight over a carpark and into Chez GQ. Caught a few other people stopping to give the water a worried glance, not something you typically see in the centre of town.

I plan to buy some wellies this week - just in case.

2tonsils

Just in, this one has much more detail to it:

http://www.ukweatherforecast.tv/turning-much-colder-with-snow-for-some/

missrlr

DH has been replaced by an alien, one who is doing useful things, life buying (ahem acquiring?) sand bags. We don't know what that dippy ones next door have done but their garden floods out to the shared driveway and it is literally mm from the bottom of our back door if it gets going for a while. There is a lot of stuff in the conservatory we need to protect (stores of root veggies, the extra fridge and freezer full of food) but more worrying its then straight into the house!!
There are lots of examples of flood plains being built on in the south, I bought a house at the top of the Downs. If it floods we are all seriously stuffed! DH one is more risky, especially as they have diverted a tributary to the wee stream locally ..... Numpties

GreyQueen

:T Well done the DH (you are sure it's the same DH, he couldn't have been secretly usurped by an alien pretending to be your beloved?)

I guess what is befalling a lot of ordinary people in the floods right now is making a few people think about their own circumstances. If you risk getting woken in the middle of the night and told to evacuate in fear of your life, bug out bags and emergency prepping suddenly seems a sensible thing, not the province of the tin hat brigade.:(

This weekend the parental units will be visiting me and they shall be taking copies of my important docs back with them to store in their house, which is an hour away, further from the sea and another 200 ft above sea level and over a mile and considerably above their rivers.

For their place floods, large sections of England would have to be awash.

I shall continue to quietly prep away and hope not to need them in earnest, but better to be looking at them than looking for them, so to speak.

thriftwizard

My hometown (not where I live as an adult) is on the confluence of two rivers and it's centre is prone to flooding when they ride high. Thus far it's OK but with the land sodden, any protracted downpours will have no where to go and that could change in the space of a few hours.

I was thinking about my hometown, which has been in continous occupation as a town for 1400 years, and there would have been some kind of settlement there beforehand, due to the defensible river site.

There is a part of town only a few hundred meters from the ancient centre which has never been built upon in all those centuries because it's a water meadow. Only now it sports an upmarket set of so-called executive homes. I wouldn't buy one of them for love nor money.

GQ - I don't live in your hometown, do I? Either that or we're twinned with the wrong towns! This is what the confluence of our small river & the bigger one looked like yesterday:-

That's normally a calm pastoral scene with cows grazing & a smallish river gracefully sliding into a bigger one that meanders round the meadows.

It's gone down a bit today, thankfully. Haven't been down where our new houses are, they're on the other side of the bridge I was standing on when I took that, but I suspect some of them will be a tad on the damp side. Luckily we are on higher ground, on the site of an old medieval monastery.

GreyQueen

No, Thriftwizard, not the same place and not nearby either. I suspect that there would be a lot of settlements on two rivers like my hometown and like yours.

My parents live well above the old town, on what was farmland until the 1960s. Which meant that getting down to town was great (freewheeling the bikes all the way) but getting back up again with the shopping was an absolute burger with only pushbikes. Town centre is in the river valley.

I'm in the centre of an ancient city which is built around it's river and which has a colourful history in the flooding department. I've seen photographs of the streets around Shoebox Towers with rowing boats in them. As a ground-floor flat dweller, it concentrates the mind wonderfully.

Glad to hear that you're dryshod and may it continue.

thriftwizard

I suspect there are an awful lot of brand-new "executive" houses on floodplains too... recently our old cricket pitch was built over for a posh supermarket, and the new pitch & clubhouse are somewhere under that lot in the picture. They had to put in land drains to do that, and - oh gosh, fancy that, now it's drained surely it's suitable for building on...? the muttering had already started. Hopefully people will remember that no, it isn't, land drains won't keep that lot away!