It was not my worst ride. More a particularly graceful piece of bad management.
During the July 1996 Big Freeze, as I slipped in a slow second gear southward into Invercargill’s Kelvin Street, I hit the Victoria Ave intersection where I thought the road was just a little too shiny for my liking.
So I tapped brakes, maybe a little hard.
I did not get a glimmer of a slowdown.
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What I did achieve, while continuing in a perfectly straight line, was a slow 360-degree pirouette before normal frictional forces resumed, and I was able to continue my path as if nothing had happened.
Black ice. The police and other traffic advisory bodies issue countless warnings about it, known bottlenecks can be marked with warning signs, and councils lie like goods. Yet it causes annual grief and occasional carnage.
Outrageously, it does so without putting in much of an appearance.
It is thin, often as large as a puddle or two, and so transparent, often identifiable as a barely-there gloss on the road. The tar road underneath sometimes – not always – shines from below, hence the somewhat helpless name.
Hamish McNeilly / Stuff
It sometimes looks black. But only sometimes. (File photo).
What to do?
For motorists, resistance is useless.
At least to the extent that you do not have to try any emphatic corrections. This will require the grip or traction that has been denied you for a moment.
The best thing you can do is – as little as possible.
Foot of the accelerator, they say, and generally look to hold your steering wheel.
(If you feel the rear of your car sliding left or right, you can make a delicate turn of the wheel in the same direction, but do not attempt emphatic correction.)
The idea, we are all told, is to drive it out. Try to stay aware of the direction your wheels are pointing, as this will quickly become important when traction returns.
Perhaps most importantly, do not drive too fast in the rotten stuff.
Yeah Al that sounds pretty crap to me, Looks like BT aint for me either.
But look. We are constantly advised to drive to the conditions. This is always good advice, but when conditions are conducive to black ice, it becomes a survival instruction.
When there is a black ice warning, or wet or dewy conditions on top of a freezing point, it should affect your travel time expectations and significantly extend your following distances.
The ice will probably form at night and early in the morning, and on a section of road without much sunshine, such as along a stand of tall trees or high embankments. It especially loves bridges and overpasses.
And if it’s on corners, so much the worse.
George Empson / Stuff
Black ice can even last until a clear enough day. (File photo)
Know your local danger areas. Black ice is one of the reasons why State Highway 94, Te Anau to Milford Sound, should not be treated like a regular highway.
But it is madness to expect the authorities to be specific about when and where black ice will occur.
We are past the middle of winter, but the sun is still at low altitudes, and we are in the period where warning stories abound.
Some are just too discouraged to revisit, but maybe it’s more helpful to enjoy a warming flashback to see those at the thunderhead – yes it was five years ago, so what? who was pinned to drive at 179 km / h in the Gibbston Valley, at a time when police had warned drivers not to go out at all unless absolutely necessary, after parts of the South Island to – 10C.
Alden Williams / Stuff
Authorities cannot always give specific warnings of danger spots. (File photo)
His idiocy led to a court sentence. And perhaps the years-long resentment of so many drivers who have been punished much more cruelly for many, many fewer offenses.
Let us not forget that black ice can be just as much a nuisance on footpaths as many broken hip pedestrians can attest.
Yet winter conditions will pass over time and summer weather awaits. And with that, the mirror image problem of summer rice – not really an ice cream, but a concoction of dust, dirty oil and other rubbish that builds up as dry ingredients on road services and then, mixed with rainfall, forms a greasy spot. which the laws of physics cease to be our friend again.