This is completely abnormal weather for Madrid. It would be objectively stupid for them to have prepared well for arctic weather, given the average temperature in January is not even below 0 C and they get on average almost no snowfall in an average year.

That’s what I meant when I said it’s normal that we are ill-prepared for this situation.

Just for the sake of comparison, Detroit gets ~33 inches of snow a year (~84 cm) and takes a number of days to clear out after much of a blizzard. It's not real worth it to have an excess of equipment that really only sees a few days of use a year (or decade!).

> It's not real worth it to have an excess of equipment that really only sees a few days of use a year (or decade!)

That’s just silly. Almost every garbage truck in Chicago has the equipment to allow a plow to be attached to it. They can nearly double their fleet of plows for big storms, which are pretty rare.

There was a unexpected blizzard in 1979 right before the mayoral election and the mayor lost because the city didn’t plow the streets fast enough. Ever since then, Chicago has always had more snow plows than needed. Even political cronies go out and shovel sidewalks because they are so afraid of losing due to snow.