Black Wednesday, as it became known, saw council salt crews involved in a hopeless task to keep roads passable following a Met Office warning about plunging temperatures across the West Midlands turning rain to snow. The problem was not only the short period gritters had to swing into action, but the stampede of workers who upon hearing radio severe weather warnings simply left their desks and jumped into cars in an attempt to escape the blizzards.
Almost certainly, nothing could have been done to prevent the resulting gridlock once panic set in.
But the inevitability of it all did not stop a brilliant, some might say cynical, onslaught by Coun Gregory and fellow Tories who in a deal to keep Labour in power had been handed sole charge of the scrutiny committee process.
Extraordinary claims were put forward, few of them ever proven, including an allegation that council engineers waited for an hour after receiving the Met Office warning before ordering emergency gritting. Gregory even arranged for a university boffin to give evidence about the supposedly small amount of grit per square metre sprinkled on to Birmingham' roads by the hapless council crews.
A quietly seething council leader, Sir Albert Bore, could only look on with mounting concern about the clear message coming from scrutiny committee meetings - that Labour couldn't be trusted to grit the roads properly.
Three years later, in February 2007, the same thing happened again. Panicking motorists made a dash for home as snow began to fall in the early afternoon, with the result that gritting crews couldn't make their way along the gridlocked roads. Cars were abandoned across the city, chaos ensued, but this time there was no inquiry since the Tory-Lib Dem coalition was by now running scrutiny committees as well as the council.