Originally published at: Slush ejected from snowplow damages at least 40 vehicles, injures 12 in Ohio | Boing Boing
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Now have I mentioned it will be 70 degrees today in Joshua Tree? I can’t remember…
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Obviously this type of reckless behavior cannot be condoned at any level, buuuuuuut
That plume of sloppy muck flying off the plow did look pretty cool.
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Why was he doing this during the day, anyhow? Here in Upstate NY, it’s a hell of a lot colder and snowier than in VA, yet the highways are cleared before morning traffic even hits them 90% of the time. The secondary operations like moving slush and snow piles usually also happen at night or in low-traffic times (I know because they wake me up constantly). This looks like poor management as much as a reckless operator.
He’s also clearly untrained or undisciplined because who tf throws debris into the other lane instead of the shoulder? Aren’t you going to just have to go down the opposite lane all over again? And as winter progresses all of that shit piles up on the median barriers and narrows the lanes. Dumbass.
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It’s annoying enough having to replace a mailbox destroyed by the snowplow. I do appreciate though some of the creative solutions that people have come up with to mitigate that problem.
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Hey, Road-side Mail-Box Piñata!
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Shhh… we shouldn’t brag about our good weather in CA.
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For four years I commuted from Denver to Colorado Springs on I-25 every day, 65 miles each way, part of which went over the top of Monument Hill, at 7,352 feet AMSL. I always admired the Colorado Highway Department drivers who made it possible in the winter, roaring down the highway in the dark in their big 5-ton dump trucks, with the plows down striking sparks from the pavement and the bed raised dropping sand behind. They probably had a lot more experience in those conditions than this Ohio dude.
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My MIL would lose her mailbox routinely to drive-by baseball bats. I had a old cast iron clothes pole that I planted on the house side of the drainage ditch with the box mounted to an extension. It would rotate if hit and was not a driving hazard. If that box got too damaged from AHs, plan B was to call in a favor and have a plate steel box formed and welded.
I would have liked to see the condition of the offending bat after that variation, but version one was tough enough to last the rest of her life.
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Probably a newby, I must say that the lake effect snows in the area of Sandusky are no joke and anyone who makes it through plowing a single winter will have more that enough experience.
This year the snows have been light and late, this may have been his first time this season.
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Nobody in Ohio calls the Turnpike a freeway. It’s certainly not free.
It’s common to call it an Interstate or just a highway.
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I’m guessing that he was supposed to drive the truck somewhere and was too out of it to realize that the plow was engaged.
Because on a highway like that, it’s never one plow, it’s a plow for every lane, arranged thus:
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Yeesh; so glad I moved away from regions that require plows in the winter.
As a former Ohio resident, at first I was gonna be all contrarian about ‘no absolutes…’ but then I realized that, personally, I cannot ever recall hearing anyone refer to it as a freeway; it was always the turnpike, highway or interstate… or by the A specific designation… ie, I-90, I-80, I-75, etc.
*edited to accommodate friendly pedantry.
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My last duty station in the USAF, not counting “out-processing,” was at the Cheyenne Mountain Complex while living in Colorado Springs. It was rather interesting driving up to the base several times a week. The latest in the year I was there was November, but I’d still be going from perfectly clear, albeit cold(ish) city streets up to the parking lot at the top of the mountain with plows running several times a day to keep the road and parking lot clear. I’d come out of a 9 to 12 hour shift and find several inches of snow on my car every night.
Now I live in Wisconsin, yet I still hate snow. I’ve told my nesting partner I must love them a lot, else I’d have moved somewhere without cold wet shit falling from the sky so often.
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What is wrong with people? Where I live, vandalizing a mailbox is a serious offence, although I don’t know if people are ever prosecuted for it. “That mailbox belongs to the Queen, young man!” (Canada, so the federal government really, but we used to be able to send mail to our MPs with “On Her Majesty’s Service” instead of a stamp so I’m going with that) Anyway, that used to be a somewhat common trivia question, “What must you buy but can never own?” and the answer was “A Mailbox!” but now of course it’s almost everything 
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Here in Ohio, we are surprisingly disorganized about snow. The way the snow has been handled by cities, counties, and the state in the past week has been laughable, as if we don’t have at least some big snows every year. The new Cleveland mayor got excoriated over the city’s poor response to removing snow.
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Yeah, I think of “freeway” as a west-coast term and seeing it applied to roadways around here is jarring.
OBTW, the Ohio Turnpike doesn’t do much North-South travel, so I-75 only crosses with it briefly. It’s mainly I-80 and I-76 in the northeastern part and I-90 westward. /pedantic
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A version I read about somewhere: You get two mailboxes, one larger than the other, and fill in between them with concrete.
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Even us Michigan folks call it I-80, turnpike, or my fave shorthand, Ohiopike. I-90 kinda gets lost in the shuffle. Weirdly all the Chicago and Indiana toll roads are just “toll roads”. 
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