A Tale of Two Weather Extremes

In Washington, D.C., still desperately attempting to dig itself out from under two huge winter snowstorms, the Capital remains shut down, with government employees granted the fourth day in a row of weather-leave; each day of which costs the government approximately one million dollars.

Schools remain closed, as do businesses, as major traffic arteries remain unpassable due to the simple fact that the District of Columbia does not possess adequate-to-this-occasion weather-inclemency snow-clearing machinery. Why would they? These are truly 'storms of the century'.

And so, normal life has wound down temporarily, while people try to cope with their lack of mobility, with the fact that a quarter-million people in the area are trying to get along without electricity, with their isolation due to their inability to go anywhere calling upon resilience and patience.

The weather conditions have stormed right on into the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, with cities like Boston also experiencing white-outs and clogged streets and huge snow dumps.

But these weather systems will pass, and go into the archives as the successive storm systems of the century, and people will marvel in hindsight about how they were able to cope with that adversity, and how, in retrospect, it really was an exciting adventure that got their adrenalin going, even though it was dreary, back-breaking work to do all that shovelling that never seemed to end....

What has occurred in Afghanistan's northern Salang Pass in the Hindu Kush is a little more in the nature of weather-related tragedy. There, a series of no fewer than 17 avalanches cleared that major route linking the country's north and south of cars and buses carrying thousands of people on a regularly-travelled route. The 3.5-kilometre pass at about the 3,400-metre above sea level carries up to 16,000 vehicles each day.

The avalanches had shoved vehicles travelling on the road deep into the valley below, some now lying upside down on the floor of the valley. Passengers could be seen from above, and heard, crying for help. Some vehicles remained on the road, simply swamped by the burden of snow that fell over them, and their occupants were discovered frozen to death. There were dozens of buses on the route, each capable of carrying 40 to 50 passengers.

Most of these were swept off the road by the force of the avalanche, and down the side of the mountain. Buses were crushed, or ripped open like sardine cans, windows smashed. The latest figures of those found dead were roughly in the 170 range, with 1,600 people rescued. But hundreds of vehicles remain trapped in the pass and many people are believed to be stranded helpless, in their vehicles.

"It is a miracle these people survived buried under the snow for 37 hours", said the governor of Parwan province, the scene of the disaster, speaking of people rescued from one bus, where they had been trapped under the force of the avalanche.

Now that's a grand-scale catastrophe, with a weather system trapping helpless travellers far from immediate rescue. One for a far different set of environment-weather annals.