Could be worse

Rico says he hates winter (and that's certainly a well-known fact by now), but Katharine Seelye has an article in The New York Times about real snow problems:

The woods may be lovely, dark, and deep, but for small New England towns like this one, snow no longer brings the peaceful sweep of easy wind and downy flake.
These days, a forecast of snow is more likely to elicit groans, both from weary humans demoralized by the pummeling from Mother Nature and from the many flat roofs on older buildings that are so common to this region. Down they have come, collapsing under record snow loads that are not melting but only accumulating, gathering mass until the structures can no longer bear the weight.
Homes, shopping plazas, a facility for people with mental illness, an airport hangar, a church, a saw mill, greenhouses, small businesses, and at least 130 barns, those set pieces of the New England landscape; all have imploded under the snow. After a brief warm spell with no precipitation in recent days, temperatures were set to plunge back into the single digits this week, resuming the freeze part of the thaw-and-freeze cycle that has been so damaging.
The exact number of collapses is not clear, but local news websites feature interactive maps that pinpoint many of them. (One lets readers calculate their distance from each collapse.)
They include one in Bozrah, a small town east of Middletown, Connecticut, where the roof caved in on a chicken coop, killing 85,000 chickens. (The Humane Society of the United States said so many chickens should not have been confined to cages in the first place.)
Humans have had narrow escapes. Among the narrowest occurred here last Wednesday, when two men working in an accounting office on the second floor of a 120-year-old brick building here on Main Street heard creaking noises. When they went to the third floor, they saw the roof beams buckle. They ran out, moments before the building came crashing down. The accounting firm was left in the rubble. So were the theater costumes and props that were stored on the third floor by the Oddfellows Playhouse. Partly crushed on the street level were a picture-framing store, a gift shop, and a barbershop with its four antique leather chairs. The bricks spilled out across Main Street, which was partly evacuated. Nearby businesses were shuttered and inspected for damages. Part of the area is still cordoned off.
“We kind of thought the end of the world was coming,” said Bessie Bianco, 24, the office manager of Sew-Fine upholsterers across the street, who witnessed the building’s fall. “The older generations say they’ve never seen anything like this. It’s really daunting. It’s tiring.”
An endless “wintry mix” has sunken southern New England into something like a vast, nondescript seafood stew, with residents barely bothering at this point to distinguish between snow and rain and sleet and freezing rain, day and night.
It began Christmas weekend and has hardly let up. What is unusual is that, between the back-to-back storms, the residue has not gone away. Instead, it has congealed into more of the same old, same old: on the ground, pedestrians pick their way on narrow icy paths through cinder-caked mounds of snow and, on the roofs, layers of ice and snow create ice dams that can back up underneath shingles and lead to cracks, leaks, and cave-ins.
The effects have rippled through every aspect of life, cooping up people with cabin fever and leaving commuters to stand on Metro-North’s busy New Haven commuter rail line, which has cut service because its aging cars do not function in extreme cold. The state is allowing towns to dump snow in certain waterways since they have nowhere else to put it.
“Clearly we aren’t used to dealing with such volume,” Ms. Bianco said. “Maybe in Vermont or New Hampshire they have better snow-removal tactics, but people here weren’t even thinking about their roofs. A friend of mine, an icicle fell from her roof through the front windshield of her car. It was probably six feet tall. It went right through.”
Schools across the region have been evacuated because of concerns that their snow-laden roofs could give way. Officials said the evacuations were precautionary but some parents went into a swivet, demanding to know why the schools had not been checked when they were empty. And they are empty a lot; this year’s many snow days are leading to makeup days that could wipe out spring break and extend into June.
The Connecticut National Guard has been called up for grueling roof-shoveling duty. Each shovelful of wet snow can weigh fifty pounds. (The state has also deployed prison inmates to shovel out buried fire hydrants.)
Ryan Ward, 30, a private roofer, was shoveling off the top of Bill’s Sport Shop but, even in the dark, he said he had to keep working. “Everybody knows that if you don’t get it done right away, someone else will take the job or the building will collapse,” he said.
An ad on Craigslist is seeking 250 workers for “9-10 hours a day, 7 days a week” and notes, “You must be able to lift 50 pounds continuously for eight-plus hours a day and stand.” The ad was from Craft Solutions Inc., a disaster-relief company based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but it is aimed at workers in Connecticut and Massachusetts. The pay was advertised as $15 an hour plus a $30 per diem and overtime after 40 hours a week. But Tom McAlister, a supervisor at the company, said in a phone interview that the pay was increased to $18 an hour because the competition for roof shovelers was so fierce. His company has rounded up what he called “grunt labor” for floods and hurricanes, but this is the first time he has put out a bulletin for snow shovelers: “Bad as it may be, I love y’all’s snowfall,” he said, mostly in jest.

Rico says the Downy Flake was a bakery on Nantucket when he lived there, but it's doubtless gone by now... (Wrong, as usual; Rico was corrected by a reader, Susan: "As for the Downeyflake bakery/restaurant, it's still on Nantucket."