Post by Dave on Mar 5, 2018 15:41:19 GMT
Torbay Snow Chaos 1st March 2018
I went to work as normal on Thursday 1st March and while it was snowing up on the Ring Road I was not too concerned about driving in it. As a professional driver I have driven in all sorts of conditions including snow, so why should today be any different.
At 9.30am I received a call from my transport manager informing me that all drivers were being called back to base. To be honest I was not too happy about it as I knew I would have been able to get my run done before the weather and snow got to bad.
I was back home in Paignton by 10.30am and later in the day was so glad I had been called back when I had been, as getting home at my normal time might have been almost impossible.
In the early afternoon around 1pm the snow really started coming down and it was not too long before cars and lorries were having problems getting up all the hills in the Bay. I spent some of the afternoon looking out of an upstairs bedroom window watching the traffic trying to get up the Brixham Road.
4x4’s were having no problems but that was not the case for two wheeled driven cars. Soon cars were having to be left on the roadside and even a large Sainsbury lorry ended up being left in the middle of the road until the following day.
I saw the best and worst of people that day, there was young girls and men pushing cars up the hill all afternoon. But there were some car drivers driving in a dangerous manner as they tried to get up the hill past cars that were struggling.
By late afternoon the road was dead, normally at that time of the day its more like a motorway, but not today. The snow kept coming down being driven by gale force winds creating a wind chill factor of -8 degrees.
People took to social media blaming the council and everyone else for that matter for the state of the roads. But even on roads that had been gritted, the snow was always going to win. All over the Bay and beyond, cars were just abandoned as people made their way home on foot.
There were lots of heroes on that day, people with 4x4’s getting hospital staff to work, helping out fellow motorists and so many other good deeds. It made one feel proud to be British because it is acts like those that put the Great in Great Britain.
With most people now home safe in the homes there was now no longer the constant sound of traffic outside of my home and that was the case for most of the next day as well. But that next day was to bring a whole host of new problems and much destruction to the Bay.
An early morning high tide that was whipped up by the gale force winds caused a great deal of flooding. Cars that had been abandoned on Torquay seafront were washed around like toys. One car was carried hundreds of yards onto the flooded Abbey Lawns. Goodrington park was under water as was Youngs Park and Broadsands car park. Beach huts on our beaches that had been vandalised only a few days before by mindless idiots, were finished off by the huge waves smashing into them.
But once again we saw Torbay is full of good people who gave their time freely to help in the big clean up. Much of the damage is going to take time to repair and some repairs may never happen due to the amount of available money to carry out the repairs.
By Saturday most of the snow had melted away and Brixham Road was full of stationary cars as people queued to get into the supermarkets. It may have only been two days of hell as far as the weather had been concerned, but soon the supermarket shelves were empty of bread and milk and many other items.
Some people had taken over an hour just to get into a supermarket car park only to find the shelves empty, then getting back into their cars to try another supermarket. There were reports of people close to fighting over the last packet of crumpets and shop staff suffering verbal abuse, it’s a good job it was only two days of disruption and not a whole week.
Even on Monday the supermarket car parks were packed with cars, some still did not have any milk and many other shelves were empty or very low on stock. The good news is the worst is now behind up and things will improve over the coming days.
All those good deeds will soon be forgotten and all the doom and gloom we so often read about every single day will also soon return back to normal. But at least I know that when things happen like they did last week, the good people of this world will stand up and put themselves forward.
Well done all those heroes and god bless you all.
Below are a few of my own photos but most I have collected on facebook etc, I hope no one minds me using them on this post.
