Moscow Mayor - Ban Snow from the City

There is an old story about the Communist Party mayor of Bridgeport, CT, Jasper McLevy. He once famously refused to pay anyone to plow snow off the roads, quipping, "God put it there, God can take it away."

Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov is taking it one step further by proposing using the Russian Air Force to stop any snow from falling onto the capital city. The idea is that the air force can seed clouds outside the city to force snowfall there instead.

“What if we force this snow to fall beyond Moscow? The Moscow region will have more water, bigger harvests, while we will have less snow,” he said at an award ceremony for Moscow’s best-kept yard.

He said that using the Air Force to prevent massive snowfall would be three times cheaper than using the regular system of trucks and snow-melting stations.

The city approved the proposal in record time.

A spokesman at the public utilities department could not explain how a “big and serious snowfall” would be identified or be deemed worthy of deploying the Air Force.

“The mayor has said it will only be a couple of times per winter,” he said, without further explanation. The department declined to provide information on how much the city budget allocates to cleaning and processing snow.

The idea has a certain panache. But one can't help wondering what unintended consequences this may lead to. Specifically, I wonder what the villagers in the suburbs of Moscow thing of being purposely covered by artificial blizzards.