Chugalug,
Ah, the delights of our mild and equable climate ! (or that's what our Geography books used to tell us). Your foolhardy CFI was lucky to have a runway at all to try, in my experience the scenario goes like this: By dint of the Herculean labours of the Student Body (under the Whips and Scorpions of their Instructors), and ATC (same from SATCO), a semblance of a runway reappears (10/10 blue dawn to dusk, of course, while these operations are in progress).
Meanwhile Clerk of the Weather watches and waits with malicious glee. When you have bust half the runway lights and final victory is at last announced, you get a 8-inch dump of snow and have to start all over again (this is built into the Training System and called "Character Building" - the
plebs have other names for it).
Yet this is Not the Spirit that made the Empire Great. Once more faithful (?) Bloggs is called to shovel and brush duty until he collapses from sheer exhaustion. You have bust the rest of your runway lights, but once again some sort of a surface is to be seen.
Then comes the weekend, it rains heavily, by Monday morning it is all gone; you didn't need to have done anything at all in the first place - the result would have been the same (except that you now have the bills for a new set of lights, umpteen hours overtime for the civilian plough drivers, and n tons of Urea for de-icing - say £800 per de-ice per runway).
There speaks the Voice of Experience (and so the most valuable attribute a SATCO can possess is an ability to persuade his OC(F) to Leave It Alone, this is not Siberia (or Berlin), just pretend it's Not There and it will (most times) go away by itself.
Admittedly, this means that all P***n has to do is to wait for the next snowfall and strike, but any weekend would do, come to that.
Cheers, Danny.