Staying warm

Here are some plows and trucks that got buried by overnight snowfall the night before we went tubing at Snoqualmie Pass. I think I have a good idea about what's going on in this picture: when I was growing up in Canada, you made sure your car had a "block heater", which is a little heating coil in the engine that can be plugged into an electrical outlet to keep the engine warm enough to start easily. When it was forecast to get really cold at night, you would park the car in the driveway and plug in the block heater so you would be able to get it started in the morning. In some towns in the far north, where it stays really cold for long periods of time, the public parking spaces each have an outlet for a block heater, lest you be stuck if you left your car for any length of time!

Anyway, my theory is that the overhead cabling and the cords leading to each of these beasts is to keep their engine blocks warm.