I was having a conversation with a friend last friday about the large amounts of snow we had gotten. This area is right in the line of fire of the lake effect snow coming off of Lake Ontario. It’s getting really, really annoying.

So she says:

I’ve had quite enough of it.  I say we put tarps over the Great Lakes to prevent all this lake effect snow.  This is the 21st century, we shouldn’t still be living like this!

And it just so happens that I was bored at work that day…so I tried to figure out how much that would cost:

I second this plan! Lets put it into motion immediately

Lets see here…the surface area of the great lakes is roughly 94,270 square miles which comes out to 2,628,096,768,000 square feet.

And according to this athletic tarp manufacturing website I just found with a custom quote option, we could order a single tarp that big for…$415,764,910,615.42 and then cut it down to size…

Or, if we get a whole bunch of 100 square foot tarps… which is roughly $28,882,783,500,000, but it won’t be a custom job and we’d have to include the cost of the kids in china in order to sew all of the tarps together.

I’m just surprised that the custom tarp calculator let me put in a tarp that big.

Oh, and in the interests of full disclosure, I made a mistake when I was calculating out the length of the sides of the big single tarp when I first sent her the message. This is a corrected figure.

It looks like it’ll be cheaper just to get one big tarp and then cut it to fit…