Snow Damage

 We've had a lot of snow around here lately, although the warm temps over the past few days are helping make it go away. I had to laugh when I saw a bunch of workers out shoveling the outdoor volleyball court last week, as if anyone could really play in the cold weather we were still having. And of course, the next day we got another four inches - so much for the cleared off court.

As clever readers might expect, some of the snow actually settled onto the roofs of some of the buildings. This highly unusual distribution of frozen precipitation had never happened before and was obviously unexpected by the people who built these buildings. Snow? On a roof? Unheard of!

Naturally, temps rose and fell, things thawed and re-froze, resulting in the icy overhanging configuration you see in the picture to the left. I realize the zoom doesn't fully convey the scale, but we're talking about more than a foot of overhanging icy snow.

You can imagine what happened next. As more and more snow accumulated, thawed, re-froze and slid around on the roof, eventually it just ripped the gutters right off.

Nice! I've always thought gutters were one of the worst designed elements of a house, what with the way they get all full of leaves, twigs, ice, etc. But fortunately, that problem is now solved for this particular building. Now that the gutters are on the ground, they'll be much easier to clean out. Maybe I'll do that at my house too.

I'm just glad I wasn't in the building when these things came down. It must have been pretty noisy...