(no subject)

[the_rck]

We got the school cancellation calls and emails yesterday around 5 p.m. I'm almost certain that the school district officials were looking at the forecast and realizing that they'd pretty certainly have to send everyone home early.

I can't judge how the roads actually were since we didn't drive anywhere. Cordelia and I stayed inside while Scott cleared the walks. He's been trying to do parts of our neighbors' walks, too, (The snowblower is on an extension cord that only goes so far. It's less ridiculous for a snowblower than it is for a mech.) because they're both ladies in their 70s who live alone.

Scott said that the snow wasn't slushy and that there wasn't ice. I think that half of the concern about the weather was that it was going to be all day snow but with a high of 33F, just enough for melting and refreezing. We got a lot of snow, and it came down all day, but it seems not to have been wet.

I have trouble understanding some school closing choices because I don't drive, but I think that I also sometimes wonder about them because I went to middle school and high school on the western side of the state. We got lake effect snow. It took about 10 inches for them to consider closing the schools. The buses had to be able to manage roads that hadn't been plowed because a lot of the areas they serviced didn't ever get plowed. We had a lot of farm kids.

Comments

[sylvaine]

I think that's the difference - is the local infrastructure equipped to handle the weather? So any time you get unusual weather, you're likely to get cancellations.

The other end of the scale is my girlfriend's university, who didn't cancel classes despite the mayor calling off all non-emergency services and the local government shutting down for the day. 🙃

[the_rck]

My suspicion is that local infrastructure for dealing with snow and ice has been deteriorating for a while because our winters have gotten weird over the last couple of decades. Some years, we never get enough snow to merit plowing. Some years, we get a dozen snowfalls that require it (on top of many that don't).

The other issue is that the school district has outsourced the busing as a cost cutting measure. Whatever company is involved may have different standards about when their vehicles can be out and transporting children. We had a couple of days, two or three years back, when school was cancelled because there weren't enough bus drivers to cover all of the routes.

After that, the district made it policy that parents have to get their children to school somehow if the buses fail. I have no idea how we would manage that now. It would probably mean taking the city bus and just being an hour late.

(The school bus takes the highway to get to the school. That takes less than 10 minutes. The city bus does spokes and hubs. If all of the times align perfectly, it's possible to get to the school in under an hour, but there's only one bus every 30 minutes, and the connection is awkward.)

[sylvaine]

UUUUURRRGGGGHHHHH cost-cutting and outsourcing, of course >__

[vom_marlowe]

Part of school closings isn't so much the snow, it's an assessment of whether students can safely wait 10 minutes or so in whatever-degree-windchill for their bus to arrive. In areas where you regularly have hard weather, officials tend to assume kids have appropriate coats/snow gear, but if it's unusual for that locale, they'll make a different judgment.

(This is something I learned as part of making closing decisions at my state uni workplace. A lot of the discussions would rope in k-12 school officials.)

[the_rck]

The low temperature line locally is -20F, inclusive of windchill. We didn't get anywhere near that yesterday and didn't expect to. It's happened in the eleven years my daughter's been in school, but both occasions were during the same winter.

We're more likely to get snow coming down and blowing around, often combined with ice on the roads.

[telophase]

When I was growing up in Texas, I was told the school district and city also made the call depending on the estimated power load on the grid--if they thought that homes and essential businesses would be needing too much power for heating, they'd close schools to lessen the load. So we'd occasionally get days off, never more than 1 or 2 a year and sometimes not at all, if there was an unusually cold snap predicted.

[the_rck]

We’ve got a very bad intersection of problems in Michigan today. One of the gas companies had a fire today and will be operating on reserves for 2-4 days. They’re asking everyone to turn down their thermostats, no higher than 65F with lower being even better. That is, we need to ration it, but the power company only has an on/off switch.

We don’t get our gas from the company with the fire, but I think our declared state of emergency will let the governor force all of the companies to share so we don’t have people die because they live in the wrong place. We have a new governor, and calling it a test by fire seems horribly on the nose.

[the_rck]

And now we have cancellations for it being deadly cold out there. There’s a localish natural gas shortage due to a fire, so I kind of expect no school Friday due to not being able to be sure of heating the buildings. I’d like to be wrong because it would mean things were safe enough to restart the plants that are too close to the one that’s burning.

[evalerie]

There used to be a long statement on the school system's website about how they make the decision about whether to close the schools. It was interesting reading, actually. They would get out a school bus that they would drive around the city in the dark at something like 3 in the morning to test out road conditions. Then various people would confer, and leaders of several local school districts would talk to each other, and if they decided that people could not walk and drive safely to school, then they would announce a school closing by 4:30 a.m.. Or something like that. They look at the slipperiness of the sidewalks, the ability for a vehicle to navigate all of the roads in the city safely, and the temperature. Sometimes if it's slippery in the parking lot at just one school, that's enough to close all of the schools in the school system.

For whatever that's worth. (I've probably garbled half of it.)

[the_rck]

I think procedures have changed. Part of that is likely that meteorology is a more reliable thing now. I suspect that Monday’s snow day had more to do with not wanting to repeat the mess of sending the kids home early that happened last year.

Do you know how the schools are heated? The Consumers fire might well mean no school Friday because of limited ability to heat the buildings. The mlive article didn’t expand on things like how much is available or who controls it.

Are you heating with solar or just using it for electric?