Snowpocalypse now
February 8th, 2010 | Life at Sea Maritime operations Ships | Posted by Phil Ewing
Thanks to this weekend's snowstorm, the crew of the destroyer Cole got an extra weekend at home before a seven-month deployment // MC2 Joshua Glassburn / Navy
Your friends at Military Times, just like everybody else here in the National Capital Region, have been beaten down by this weekend’s record snowstorm. Cars are caked with ice, their doors frozen shut; the roads have either become impassable with slush or turned into dangerous, friction-free runways; and even Scoop Deck’s favorite deli, around the corner from the Center of Excellence, is closed today “because of extreme weather.”
However, you can say this for the storm: It gave the crew of the destroyer Cole a few extra hours to be home with their families and friends over the weekend. The ship was originally scheduled to sail last Friday for a seven-month pirate-patrol/maritime security mission, but the departure was postponed because of worries about snow. Unpleasant as it can be to say goodbye to loved ones going away in a big warship, it sounds even worse to do so in a driving snowstorm. A spokeswoman for Surface Forces Atlantic confirmed this morning the Cole was on schedule to leave today.
Hope they didn’t have a lot of snow to shovel off … it was hard enough to get cars loose this morning — imagine trying to clear off a destroyer.
Comments
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Bruce Says:
February 16th, 2010 at 11:25 amI wonder how high you would need to crank up the Aegis radar so that it would melt the snow? But given the option of shoveling 3 feet of snow or microwaved seagulls off the deck, I think I’d take the former.