Roughly 5 inches of snow at castle QM today
The government sought to avert a grit crisis yesterday by asking councils and highways chiefs to cut usage by at least a quarter, amid indications that Britain faces a serious road salt shortage by the end of next week.Yes, they tell the councils to use a quarter less grit instead. So increasing the likelihood of people being trapped in, running out of food, increasing accidents on the roads a slowdown of deliveries to supermarkets and traders.
According to one estimate in Whitehall, local authorities and the Highways Agency are getting through 60,000 tonnes of salt per day – double the usual rate for a serious cold snap. Daily salt production cannot keep up, running at 15,000 tonnes per day with a stockpile of 320,000 tonnes of salt left until supplies arrive from Spain on 22 January, and the US on 28 January.
Under that scenario, and with more heavy snow expected over the weekend, salt stocks would reach a critical state by Friday without a 25% cut in grit distribution.
The AA said that it had written to the Department for Transport and the Local Government Association two months ago to warn salt supplies could not cope with a repeat of last February's big freeze, when the response of local authorities was heavily criticised. "This cold snap is longer than forecast but we did have warnings last February," said Edmund King, AA president.
They were warned last year that there might be a problem, but followed the path of enviroloon dogma to its natural conclusion of pretending that winters wouldn't happen anymore and that snow would become a rarity all the while taxing us to the hilt to pay for economic mismanagement and lunatic power schemes such as windfarms.
They also plan to nab (without compensation) grit supplies from competent councils who stored enough (mostly Tory) to hand over to gullible spendthrift (though not on grit) councils who have run out (mostly Labour)
This is madness and there's bugger all we can do about it as the damage is already done, we wont have any more grit till the end of the month!
Incompetence thy name is Labour!
4 annotations:
What they are doing with the grit is the essence of Socialism, captured in a nutshell. Like the opposite of Aesop's fable of the ant and the cricket.
In Labour's fable the cricket tuens up and confiscates the ants stores to share them according to the cricket's winter need.
Stupid bastards.
My old Dad always used to describe socialists as being someone with a knife and fork in search of someone else with a pie.
And that was 50 years ago - nothing new uinder the sun, eh?
Of course it would be quite reasonable for councils to say that they took expert advice from the Government and Met Office, and they were told that we would have a warmer than average winter! Didn't some Professor say last year that we would be unlikely to see snow again in this country in our lifetime?
A good reason for NOT taking expert advice!
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