My grandpa used to plow the roads in Red Lake County in northern MN in the 40's with a grader that had a big V plow with a wing. His son, my uncle, would follow behind with the dump fulla gravel with another wing mounted to it. They could do a pretty good job in one pass of the road.
Well one morning at 4:00am it was -50 below actual and that old diesel grader's fuel was gelled up again and the roads were drifted shut. So gramps threw some wood under the old beast with a splash of diesel and lit a fire to warm it up. About 5 minutes later he's yelling to my grandma, mom, and sisters, "Girls! Get up! The grader's on fire!" So my mom and my aunts who ranged from 12 to 2 tried filling buckets with water from the old hand pump in the kitchen and running them outside, sloshing all the way. The water froze hard on the kitchen floor, steps, and outside to the point they couldn't even stand up anymore. Gramps got the fire knocked down enough with water and shoveled snow to get the rig running up and driven off the fire - not too much worse for wear. The kids and grandma? Not so much. My old Norwegian grandma gave him hell about that for 50 years.
We still laugh about it. I bet gram and gramps would get a real good chuckle out of this "Polar Vortex".
