It's Day Three of No School for the kids. The storm was Tuesday and Wednesday, and I would guess it dropped somewhere between 6 and 8 inches. That alone wouldn't account for the problems. It was the recipe. Some weather person called it an ice sandwich, and that was a pretty good description: several hours of snow followed by several hours of freezing rain followed by several hours of snow. All the while the temperature dropped. The stuff is hard and it's stuck fast.
I spent much of Wednesday shoveling, as best I could, my driveway. My driveway is at a slant, and moisture puddles up at the bottom at the sidewalk. Two days later, I can still see the treadmarks of my boots in the frozen slush that has adhered to the sidewalk. The freezing rain froze within a few hours on Wednesday. Today's high temperature is supposed to be 27 degrees. There won't be that much melt today.
Many of the driveways in my neighborhood remain uncleared. You need a standard shovel to chop the ice out, and then remove it. Snowblowers are getting killed in this stuff. I watched a snow removal service start to remove the ice from the sidewalk from our neighbors across the street. They gave up. There's no quick and efficient way to get rid of this stuff at this point - either you wait for nature to warm up the environs and make it easy to shovel up slush, or you slowly chip away.
I've only lived in Central Pennsylvania for 15 years, but I haven't seen a storm of this recipe before. We've had big snows that stop the state in its tracks for a bit (oh yeah, 1996...) and we've had freezing rain that's done the same - but this was different and seemed to provide a tantalizingly too short window to get the mixture out of the way.
I see where Pennsylvania is getting a bit of a black eye in the news media for the highway problems during the storm. You can't help but feel sympathetic to everyone involved - people stuck on the highway, road crews trying to clear the roads, police. And there's sure to be some real improvements in governance in the future to reduce the possibility of this happening at this scope and level again. But there's really no villain here. Sometimes Mother Nature kicks our ass.
You need a floor scraper, basically an 8 to 12 inch cold chisel with a five foot metal handle to deal with it on a sidewalk or driveway. That will break it up, but then you need a heavy scoop or front loader to get it out of the way.