Quote:
Originally Posted by MartJ
Well I remember the winter of 1962-63, it started snowing just before Christmas and snow was on the ground until the beginning of March.
<snip>
The temperatures were below freezing most days and we had no double glazing or central heating, with ice forming on inside of windows. Most people still went to work, usually walking as most people then living close to their place of work.
So if this winter is to be worse than that it has alot to live up to and if does come it will cause chaos on a scale not seen before as most people would not know how to cope.
|
The bit I put in bold really goes to the heart of the issue. These days it is not uncommon for people to commute by car for an hour or more to work - often much, much more in the southeast of England. Our pattern of life simply isn't as resilient to disruptions in our transport infrastructure as it once was.
All our roads are far more heavily used and a great deal of freight is carried on them. A vast number of the problems on the roads over the last couple of weeks has been jack-knifed lorries - something that would have been less of a problem in the 1960s with fewer lorries on the road and fewer cars to get stuck behind them.
As for frozen toilets and the use of your local pub .... well I don't doubt that worked as a solution to the problem, but thankfully attitudes towards health and hygiene in schools are now a light-year away from what they used to be. Indoor toilets will have solved most freezing problems, but if our childrens' school suffered a loss of running water for any reason, these days it would be forced to close, and rightly so in my view.