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By Jeremy Schiffres, Daily and Sunday Freeman, Kingston, N.Y.

Monday, December 3, 2007

Winter blunderland

On Saturday, the weather prognosticators told us there would be an inch or two of snow on Sunday, a mix of sleet and freezing rain Sunday night into early Monday and then a mix of rain and snow all day Monday.

It’s now 9:45 a.m. Monday and the sun is out. Another fine job, guys!

And speaking of weather, I couldn’t help but notice when I was in Syracuse the day after Thanksgiving that it snowed for about 10 hours but nothing accumulated on the roads. Here, it snows for 15 minutes and roads become slick and dangerous. The difference? Snow-trained cities like Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo get their roads salted both before and during snowfalls, causing the wintry precipitation to melt on contact. Here, the people in charge of cleaning our roads let the precipitation fall for a while before doing anything about it-- if they do anything at all. (The side street I live on in Kingston was never touched by the city on Sunday.) And they almost never use salt. The result is dangerous driving, car accidents that could have been prevented and far too many school closings when there’s less than an inch of snow on the ground.

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