A Very Snowy Truck
This truck is the subject of my post this evening – and the snow on top of it. But before I get there, isn’t the advertising on the back of this truck really cool? This is a good angle for it – it doesn’t work nearly as well if you are to the right of the truck.
OK, so here’s the deal. If you don’t live in an area that is snowy and cold from time to time, you might not have experienced the exploding snow-roof. I can’t show you that today, but I can show you its little cousin: the big snowpile on truck falls off. There’s also the front slide-off, but I’ll get to that later.
So here’s the setup. It’s winter. It has snowed recently. A lot of people don’t like to clean all the snow from their cars. The most lazy just clear a hole in the front windshield, turn the heat up as high as it will go and drive off to experience time-delayed vision enhancement. At the start, vision is, well, pretty unenhanced. Of course, there’s no peripheral vision until you use the power windows to lower and raise the driver and passenger-side windows – just to clear the snow off. It doesn’t work very well. Then there’s this: the ambient light inside a car that is covered in snow is creepy.
But anyway, the more industrious pursue the ‘mohawk’ technique. This is where you take your snow brush and walk along each long side of the car removing snow within arms reach. You are left with a snow mohawk. But I really don’t know what the story is with this truck. It looked like one of two things happened:
- Someone tried to back it under an object to push the snow off and then realized what a terrible idea that was and stopped
- Someone climbed up the back and tried to push the snow around with a shovel and then realized what a terrible idea that was and stopped
At any rate, the truck has a normal snowfall along the top until you get close to the back, then it has this hump of disorganized snow sticking up. Now there are a couple of ways that this snow can come off the truck. In this case, with a lump of snow near the back, it’s going to come off when the truck bounces.
The wind will help a little too, but I think there is a pretty significant slip-stream on one of these things coming up over the hood, so I don’t really know how much it helps. But look, here’s the deal. The snow is going to come off. It always comes off. There’s a very simple reason: your vehicle gets warm as you drive it. The roof heats up. A layer of water forms between the snow and the rooftop. You hit the brakes and the next thing you know the entire contents of your roof are lying across the hood and windshield. Boy is that dangerous, especially since it’s heavy enough that your wipers might not clear it. That’s a front slide-off, by the way.
Equally concerning is the exploding snow-roof. This occurs in your typical passenger vehicle when you have a snow covered roof and several conditions occur. The first is that you have driven long enough to get the water wedge between the snow and the car. The second is that you get enough wind from the car’s motion and nature that it starts to catch the underside of the snow in the front of the vehicle. I kid you not about what happens next. The snow on the roof turns into a wing. The wind gets under it and since there is nothing but water there, the wind wedges all the way through and lifts the snow as a single unit up into the air. Once that happens, if you are at highway speed, the snow-unit will shoot upwards, spinning and then crash down on the road behind the vehicle.
But that didn’t happen today. Today was a standard snow-lump drop-off kind of event.
