Driving in the Rain.

[TheSHAD0W]

Here in the desert, we've had periods with no rain for more than 6 months. Over time, the little drippings cars release build up in the asphalt. If we're lucky, we get the usual isolated thunderstorm or monsoon that does a good job of quickly rinsing off the road. But on the rare occasion when, after all that time, we only get a sprinkle... You'd think it was winter in Canada and black ice was on the road. Cars all go sideways. I'd be hysterical if it weren't for the carnage.

[protege]

Dunno about anyone else, but we dump it in Halifax Harbour.

Here though, even with 3 rivers...there's really nowhere to dump it. Dropping it into the rivers actually makes the problem worse--we usually get massive flooding in some areas when the thaws come

[Shalom]

Dunno about anyone else, but we dump it in Halifax Harbour.

Several years ago, New York City had several days in a row of snow, and it piled up to where they couldn't figure out where to get rid of it. Eventually they loaded it into dump trucks, backed them out on a pier and dumped them into the East River. This got the environmentalists all up in arms. "How can you dump that in the river, it's all full of salt from the roads!" until someone in the city government eventually pointed out that the damn East River is made of salt water to begin with. This shut them up.

(Not technically a river, it's a tidal strait connecting New York Bay and Long Island Sound, both of which are salt.)

I read in a railroad history book how the Canadian railroads dealt with snow in their yards during the steam era. You can't plow out yard tracks with a snowplow, because all you'll accomplish is to just bury the next track over. The Canadian National had one of their master mechanics cobble up an apparatus which scooped up snow, melted it with steam from the locomotive, and pumped it into a tank car. When that was full, they ran it out onto the nearest bridge and poured it out into (or onto) the river, then went back for more. This machine would just go back and forth, back and forth, from one end of the yard to the other, all day long during the snowstorms.

The Canadian Pacific took the easier way out: any time they had an empty gondola or hopper car going south, they'd fill it with snow before dispatching it. By the time that car got back to its home road in South Carolina or wherever, it had all melted and they were shut of it...

[Chromatix]

I don't know what they do with the snow in Helsinki, except that I've seen lorries (of the kind used to move rock and gravel) loaded with the stuff and presumably heading somewhere. But there's plenty of places that it *could* go, including the Baltic Sea or any amount of countryside.