The_Doc_Man is off for a while

[The_Doc_Man]

Send a little water westward!

Would that I could. I would GLADLY share, but we don't get a say in which way the wind blows. All we know is that it blows - which paradoxically, sometimes sucks.

 

[Cotswold]

Over here we only know about the occasional bad weather. We just do not experience extreme weather.
If it blows a candle out on Tower Bridge, the BBC are reporting high winds in London and the South East. Followed by instructions not to travel unless essential. But as the Doc said wherever you live in the USA there are extremes. It is maybe just a matter of picking which one suits you best.
There are towns not far from us on the banks of the River Severn where houses flood regularly. But it doesn't appear to affect their values. Some have tiled the walls on the ground floor to make it easier to clean out after a flood.
I was out walking in the hills last week and met a couple from Utah who said it wasn't unusual to have four feet of snow over huge areas. We may see nearly that for a short time in the high fells but very localised and mainly just drifted snow.

 

[ColinEssex]

I was out walking in the hills last week and met a couple from Utah who said it wasn't unusual to have four feet of snow over huge areas. We may see nearly that for a short time in the high fells but very localised and mainly just drifted snow.

In Essex a year or 2 ago, we had 1/4 to 1/2 inch of snow. Schools closed, buses stopped, shops closed early, drivers warned not to go out unless urgent. I walked over to our paper shop but no papers. Delivery vans not delivering.
In the UK, we take health and safety to the extreme, it's totally ridiculous.
Col

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Col, I can remember that in the mid-1950s New Orleans actually got cold enough for snow, and that the snow formed piles on the ground that stayed as such for about 3 days. I was too young to remember issues with traffic, but at the time our subdivision was new enough that we had a gravel road anyway. Paving came later.

I made a snowman and Mom made "snow ice cream" - really just some vanilla flavoring, Pet condensed milk, and a little bit of sugar water poured over a cup of snow. Once every seven years since I was a little tyke, it got cold enough that we would get a brief snow flurry. And, because it is such a rare event, nobody who was born here knows how to drive on a frozen road with ice patches.

But then again, during Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, I had been relocated to Ft. Worth Texas for several months. Even though they DO get more regular snow events, when we had a freezing-weather storm (really hard freeze and some snow / freezing rain on the roads), it made the local news due to the backlog of people waiting for a tow truck to pull them out of ditches and to bring their cars to body shops for repairs. Texans couldn't handle snow either. On the 10 PM news that night, local stations were posting interviews with tow truck drivers who had as many as 10 requests for tow service still pending, and they had already serviced more than a dozen requests earlier. That night, it was GOOD to be a tow-truck owner/operator.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

sorry to hear you've been battered again.

And now, I feel like I've been fried. Earlier in the thread, I talked about a tree coming down and because of it did to the sidewalk while alive, having to get new concrete laid down for driveway and sidewalk. Turned out to be a 4-digit number but not a low one.

BUT in order to lay the concrete according to regulation, we had to have stump and root grinding for the parts of the tree that had insinuated itself under the old sidewalk and lifted it up. That was needed to control the elevation of the driveway and sidewalk, which ARE covered by various ordinances. Took the relevant local government two more tries to get it right, and the second time we had to disassemble the fence so the grinder could reach the area. So of course I wanted to repair the fence.

But NOW I find out that I cannot repair the fence because of permitting requirements and an ordnance that was passed AFTER the fence was originally built. I now have to change the design on the fence or else I will have to get a zoning variance. Redesigning the fence - given the new concrete we just laid - will be more expensive than getting a variance. Either way, here goes more money. And it all started when our termite guy found termites in a tree - six months ago. I'm still not out of the woods yet. What a pain.

Bureaucracy. Unlike the old phrase about women: Can't live with them, can't live without them, for bureaucracy, it is just: Can't live with them.

 

[ColinEssex]

Your house insurance should cover that.
Col

 

[The_Doc_Man]

But it doesn't. Col, regulatory-related expenses are not covered by homeowner's insurance. Neither are voluntary fence disassemblies done in order to comply with other regulations.

 

[ColinEssex]

But it doesn't. Col, regulatory-related expenses are not covered by homeowner's insurance. Neither are voluntary fence disassemblies done in order to comply with other regulations.

Insurance companies always squirm out of paying out.
Col

 

[Cotswold]

The basic rule is that you are insured for everything, except the things you claim for.

Back in the days when I was in steel fabrication, our insurance guy told us that for all small claims, they'd look to recover 110% within two years.
So maybe think before you claim for a damaged carpet etc. The next year your insurance will go up, maybe every year for five years. Every year you'll need to state that you have had a claim within the last five years, even if you change insurers. It's a game and all good fun.

 

[Pat Hartman]

With insurance, you have to read the fine print. The objective of the company is to collect premiums without paying for claims. Homeowners insurance is notorious for not covering obvious risks. With auto insurance, if you are not at fault, the other party's company pays. Your company only pays if the other company doesn't have insurance or has insufficient coverage. Of course, you are not able to register a vehicle without insuring it but that doesn't stop people from not paying the premiums and having the policy cancelled. If you're at fault, your company pays for both you and the other party.

 

[Isaac]

@The_Doc_Man I'm sorry to hear of those troubles, that's potentially discouraging and expensive. We had a home in Fort Worth TX where poop started coming up in the shower - root cause, a similar problem as yours with a tree and a sidewalk and a drain pipe competing for space and water (or in this case sewage). City paid for nothing in the end, because one of my trees might have been partly to blame. Between that and the weird fact that DFW allows trains to pass through just EVERYWHERE, we have a bad memory of our time in Texas.
A foul taste in our mouth, so to speak.

Edit: I will NEVER forget the night that my wife's family from Mexico was going to come visit. She is a very fashionable, elegant type of person with excellent taste and medium-high expectations for things like lodging, food, cleanliness especially. My phone rings and my wife says "We're 15 minutes away". My response: "Dear God, DO NOT COME - ABORT! - Sewage is 3" in the hallway.
I might have been exaggerating a bit but it was a real stinky affair. Upon hearing the description of what awaited the in laws, my wife swung around and headed for the nearest Hilton