New York Snow

When I was a boy the type of snowfall upstate New York is receiving was one of the more exciting events in my life. It meant eating breakfast and anxiously listening to the school closings on WBEN. When we heard "all Buffalo public and parochial schools are closed," we knew that our school district would soon be listed as well. Whee.

But watching homeowners shoveling snow off their roofs reminds me of one year when we lived in Chicago. We received over 90 inches and as is the case now, many people were clamoring onto the roof to shovel it off. In Chicago, this did not happen in very often so people were not experienced with rooftop snow removal. Many came off the roof much faster then they went on - and sometimes continued to the hospital.

What the news reports do not mention is that it is not only the snow weight that is a problem but freezing and thawing of the lower layers develops a solid layer of ice. Thus you have the weight plus the expansion of the ice creating crevices for water intrusion. I was on the roof with a garden hose run through a window to a hot water tap. The hot water melted the ice at the roof level and, using an axe, I chopped the ice into blocks and shoved them off the roof. If that had been a more common occurrence I'm sure we would have been pushing snow off the roof long before it caked into ice. Better insulation might have been a good idea as well but I had a better one, we moved to California.