Frustration continued to mount among D.C.-area residents Wednesday as some residential streets remained unplowed three days after a major winter storm dumped ice-crusted snow across the region.
People in D.C. and surrounding counties were flooding local lawmakers and 311 systems with complaints. Pedestrians climbed over mounds of concrete-like snow-ice or walked in the street to avoid the sidewalks businesses or homeowners had failed to clear. And cars were encased in walls of nearly unmovable bergs.
Elected leaders in the D.C. region asked for patience and said the icy conditions were causing challenges that they were working to overcome. D.C. officials on Wednesday said 85 percent to 90 percent of the city had become navigable by car, and the city would address the icebergs that have stymied pedestrians. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) said D.C. public schools were reopening Thursday with a two-hour delay. And Randy Clarke, chief executive of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, said nearly all bus routes were in service and the rail system would return to normal operations Thursday.
The city is shifting some of its snow removal operations to use specialized equipment to haul snow off the streets, officials said — including in crosswalks that have been menacing pedestrians carving a footpath over small hills of snow. More than 300 snowplows have been deployed.
Asked what the city could have done differently in its snow response, Bowser said the city would do a review as it does after any major weather event, “and I’m sure we’re going to learn some things from this response as well.”
“I’ve responded to a lot of snowstorms. This kind of combination of snow, I call it like ice-rain, cold — I’m not really sure that we have seen that combination like that,” she said. “So I think some adjustments we made early on are paying off, especially moving to a scooping operation, which I know is going to make it a lot easier for people to walk and to get to the bus stops.”
Across the region, government officials pointed to a main culprit in the slower than usual response: the ice — in some cases causing broken snowplows and requiring specialized equipment, as the sustained below-freezing temperatures have only further hardened the snow.
D.C. City Administrator Kevin Donahue said that has been a serious challenge particularly for lighter snowplows, which can handle smaller residential streets but are not meant to plow through ice; some have broken and required repair.
Some residents have questioned why the city is not deploying more plows. Donahue said there has been a supply-chain issue: While in past snow storms, D.C. has called down “little convoys” of snowplows from Massachusetts or New York, the “geographic expansiveness” of last weekend’s winter storm has meant that the plows are in high demand everywhere. He said the city’s online snowplow tracker that residents have been monitoring and finding frustrating — sometimes showing as few as several dozen plows out — was often displaying incorrect information due to the contractors’ plows not being correctly hooked up to the city’s GPS system.
“Given the nature and complexity of this storm, our residents should have high expectations,” Donahue said. “We are doing everything around-the-clock to meet those expectations.”
On Tuesday night, D.C. began shifting to more specialized equipment to remove snow from the streets rather than merely plowing it to the side. Starting in the downtown core and moving outward, construction-like vehicles that can front-load snow were dumping it into dump trucks, which are then hauling it to the parking lots at RFK Stadium, Donahue said. The city is also bringing heavier plows onto residential streets.
D.C. Council Member Brianne K. Nadeau (D-Ward 1), who has oversight of the Department of Public Works, said in a statement Wednesday that she planned to dig into the city’s snow response in an upcoming oversight hearing — including the administration’s communication to concerned residents.
The frustration was felt in a wide swath of the country where the winter storm hit, including in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh — both areas used to snow, but not to the slow pace of clearing what remained of the icy storm. In contrast, New York City received about a foot of snow and sleet, but Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) declared “every street in the city had been plowed” about 12 hours after the storm ended and the city’s school buildings reopened Tuesday.
Across Northern Virginia, transportation officials were pivoting to a similar plan as D.C. In some cases, the storm’s combination of wet snow and compacted sleet has required heavier equipment than usual, including front-end loaders and tractors that the Virginia Department of Transportation does not typically deploy for snowstorms.
“It’s one thing if you have two feet of heavy, wet snow,” said Alex Liggitt, communications manager for VDOT’s Northern Virginia District. “But we had six to 10 inches of snow, and almost half of that was sleet. That was the issue.”
Alexandria, as an independent city in Virginia is responsible for plowing its own roads, and as a policy must finish clearing its primary roads before moving onto secondary and then residential streets. Because of how long it’s taken to clear those primary roads, other thoroughfares have often been completely frozen over by the time the fleet gets to them, Mayor Alyia Gaskins (D) said. Those streets do not usually fit large snowplows and instead require ice picks or Bobcats to clear the roads.
On Duke Street, one of the city’s main arterials, it normally takes about two to three passes to clear what Gaskins called “light, fluffy snow.” After this snowstorm, it took 20 passes.
“It’s not like we don’t have crews there. It’s not like we weren’t planning for this. It’s that as the streets became colder and became icier, each street takes a lot longer than its taken in a regular storm,” Gaskins added.
Many across the region do not have the luxury of working from home, requiring some to venture out on dicey commutes or take other measures — like one nurse who slept on an air mattress in an office for several nights at Inova Loudoun Hospital and a pair of others who paid to stay in a hotel nearby.
“I had to show up,” said one of the nurses, Shelby Shumaker, 31. “I was going to show up for my team and patients and make sure I was there when they needed me.”
Victor Romero, a 70-year-old retiree on Capitol Hill, said he and neighbors helped push cars out of jams in the unplowed road outside his house. Romero said he had to give the city the benefit of the doubt — the storm was nasty.
“No one can get ahead of Mother Nature,” he said. “It’s just that simple. … We do our best to take it in stride.”
As in D.C., Montgomery County’s operations team was encountering mechanical failures with the equipment and buggy technology that has frustrated residents. The county has exhausted its $10 million snow budget and plans to seek a supplemental appropriation from the County Council, a step Emily DeTitta, a spokeswoman for the transportation department, described as standard during severe winters, as officials monitor the possibility of more snow this weekend.
Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich (D) said the county’s snow tracker, which indicates which streets have been plowed, is “not suitable” for following the county’s actual progress. Mechanical failures and other factors have limited the county’s ability to clean entire routes. County leaders have also learned that sometimes service requests have been marked as “closed” even if a street hasn’t been plowed yet.
Montgomery County Department of Transportation Director Chris Conklin said that the service requests for plowing are still being received and processed. He added that about 90 percent of the county’s roads have been cleared, but there isn’t “a lot of confidence where in the 90s we are.”
“We are working hard, our crews are working hard, our equipment is working hard and some of it is breaking,” he said. “The snow and ice is very difficult to move, and the equipment has been at it now for six straight days.”
In Prince George’s County, County Executive Aisha Braveboy (D) said residential roads should be passable by midnight Wednesday after primary and secondary routes were cleared. “We believe we can meet that goal,” Braveboy said, noting that a strike force has been mobilized to target cul-de-sacs, narrow streets, and hard-to-reach areas, particularly in central and southern parts of the county.
County officials warned that parked cars have slowed clearing in some neighborhoods, while Operation Silver Shovel — an emergency snow assistance program for residents with limited mobility — has reached capacity after more than 4,000 requests.
Bowser said she realized that residents’ expectations for going “back to normal” may differ from D.C.’s pursuit to make roads passable — for example, she said that doesn’t include digging out cars. Yet as anxious residents await a more navigable commute, meteorologists are monitoring potential additional snowfall headed to the region this weekend.
“If the storm does boom, it could leave us up to four additional inches of snow,” Bowser said. “We will continue to monitor that closely in the days ahead.”
Nicole Asbury, Tim Craig and Dana Hedgpeth contributed to this report.
The post Slow snow and ice removal frustrates residents across D.C. region appeared first on Washington Post.
