The Big Chill’ brings out the best in many people

Date Published: 07-Jan-2011

AS Charles Dickens said in A Tale of Two Cities . . . "it was the best of times and it was the worst of times." I refer of course to what must go down in history as 'the big freeze'.

I think we will remember it for more than just the extraordinary temperatures. It will also be recalled for what people did for others.

The visitation was only a few days old at the beginning of December when I was calling on some friends in Waterford over a weekend. I had arrived on the Friday evening and intended to stay until the Sunday, but the persistent fall of the snow on the Saturday morning, forced a decision to head for home before the snow got too deep.

We had scarcely left Waterford City and gone through one of the major roundabouts leading to Limerick, when the roundabout closed behind us, according to the AA Roadwatch. An articulated lorry had jack-knifed.

Behind us there were now five inches of snow in Waterford and as we drove through heavy snow at four miles-per-hour in places like Mooncoin, we realised that, maybe, we were escaping from the dawning of an historic weather event.

The first 20 miles took nearly an hour-and-a-half, but just up the road in Tipperary town there was bright sunshine, not a sign of snow, but bitter frost.

People were looking rather peculiarly at our car passing through their town carrying three inches of snow on the roof and with the wiper blades now thudding into frozen and compacted snow at the end of their travel on the freezing windscreen.

But already, some of the remarkable things which people would do to help each other, were starting to happen. At one point, a farmer was out with his tractor at the end of a narrow side road where cars were having difficulty getting up an incline to the main road. He was towing cars which otherwise would have been stranded. And with him were a gang of four young fellows who were pushing an Avensis on to the main carriageway.

There were plenty of similar examples in the following days and weeks, but one which struck me particularly was the case of a City Link bus which was travelling from Dublin to Galway on a night when the journey was taking five to six hours.

Cars were stuck on roads near Chapelizod for hours-on-end as people tried to get home, and some even abandoned their cars.

One of the inconveniences – and that is putting it much too mildly – was that people needed to go to the loo after possibly five hours on the road. The bus driver obliged by allowing a group of them go on board to use the toilet facilities on the coach.

For more of JC’s column see page 15 of this week’s City Tribune.