2014 February 7-8 Blizzard

Or to use a more media popular name "SNOWPACALYPSE 2014"

2014 Japan "Snowpacalypse" (click to enlarge)

Yep. We got about 50cm (1'7") or so of very wet heavy snow. Most of you back home think- Well, that's a fair amount, but not really a tragic event.

Panorama from the living room window (click to enlarge)
You can see the hydroponic strawberries on the left by the fence

Imagine if you had no plows. If you had no rocksalt and sand. Imagine that your streets were only 16' wide, with walls on both sides.

My Bench!!! and the bus stop

Even with daytime temps of 7-8 (mid 40s F) we have a lot of snow to melt. It truly was a snowpacalypse here.

Dog and goats at a loss of what to do

But the city's skiploader that doubles as the "plow" finally made it to our driveway at 1:00 on Monday, so I was able to get on the bike and go to work. Man, that was a lot of damage. If you don't get heavy snows for 20 years, the trees don't grow expecting it, and MAN, a lot of them just shattered! About 10-20 meters up, they just shattered and the tops fell off. So our mountains look like... well, cedar plantations with a lot of toothpicks sticking up here and there. (You have to realize, there are thousands to tens of thousands of trees on each mountain, if one percent of them shattered, that is a lot of trees, but still only one percent)

Concrete power poles are not supposed to have a visible bend in them....

Just how heavy was that snow?!?!

Well, it is all over but the cleanup, and I got a lot of cheap wood. (I am a firm believer in burning cedar in my woodstove). The neighbors laugh at me, but my house is a comfortable 20-25 degrees, so I laugh back at them, trying to split knotty hardwoods while 15" cedar splits when I just grip my maul and look at it sternly.
And it dries faster than their hardwoods, so I get more heat value then they do.