For week two, Rochelle Harrod remained stuck.
The first time she tried to leave her apartment after a late-January snowstorm left the D.C. area locked down in “snowcrete,” she made it down the elevator from her Hyattsville, Maryland, apartment but could go no further than a few feet outside the front door. The wheels of her 300-pound motorized wheelchair couldn’t make it over a snow-covered ramp.
Then, after the sidewalks outside of her complex that lead to a nearby shopping center were shoveled, the path remained too narrow to fit her wheelchair. Plows had also dumped huge mounds of snow into the curb cuts, preventing her from getting to a nearby bus stop that she uses to get to her job as an independent living specialist in Silver Spring.
“I felt very frustrated and angry,” Harrod, 47, said. “Nobody thinks about us during a snowstorm. People with disabilities are the last to be thought of and considered.”
The snow is now, finally, starting to melt. Once it’s gone, the memories of the inconveniences it caused will fade for many. But for Harrod and other adults and children with disabilities and limited mobility, the challenges it created raise serious questions about what will happen the next time ice and snow cover the region.
Many advocates and people with disabilities said they plan to reach out to area volunteer groups, neighbors and friends to spread the word in a public service campaign that in future snowstorms the region needs to do better to help those with disabilities. They also said they plan to push local government leaders to send out reminders to the public to be more mindful when shoveling and plowing and enforce ordinances for not clearing sidewalks.
“People don’t think about those who need to get around and have mobility issues unless it’s part of their family,” said Lucy Beadnell, chief advocacy and policy officer at the Arc of Northern Virginia. “And when we only get a snowstorm once every one or two years, they forget.”
For this snowstorm, people with disabilities and advocates saw plenty of problems in the region. Plows cleared roads of snow and ice but often left large piles blocking the paths from crosswalks onto sidewalks. Handicap parking spots were typically a place to push huge mountains of snowcrete, or a combination of snow, sleet and ice that refreezes and becomes rock solid. And not every sidewalk got shoveled, making it precarious for people in wheelchairs to motor down them and forcing them to get in the streets as they weaved around slick spots.
The logistical nightmares left many people with mobility challenges, advocates said, unable to get to their jobs, medical appointments or run errands, and instead they have been mostly homebound.
“It’s already really hard if you have a disability to get around,” Beadnell said. “But since the snow, it’s been borderline impossible.”
Sadly, she said, many people don’t file formal complaints with government officials because “they know the drill.”
“There is no one who’s going to come and fix it,” she said. “Folks are so disheartened.”
One of the biggest frustrations, she said, was how most sidewalks get shoveled but often there’s one resident or a business that doesn’t clear it at all — or enough — for a person in a wheelchair to go on it. Then with streets made more narrow by mounds of snowcrete and parked cars on the sides, it becomes “downright terrifying if you’re in a motorized chair and have to navigate” in the street.
Another problem, she and other disability advocates said, has been the demand for Metro Access — the transit agency’s vehicle ride service. Because it had so many calls for rides from people with disabilities who would normally take the bus or trains, many clients had to schedule their outings up to two hours earlier than they needed to make sure they could get where they were going.
Terri Lamb, who works for Reston-based DATA Mobility Partners — a group that helps people with disabilities and older adults in Northern Virginia learn how to get around as independently as possible — said for every story she has heard from clients who have struggled to get around in recent week, she knows “there are multiple more.”
She, like many other advocates, said many of her clients have had to “hunker in and just stay home.”
“It’s just too difficult, too dangerous, and if there’s a problem and someone gets stuck or nearly stranded in the snow, it’s just not worth it,” Lamb said.
Noor Pervez, 30, who uses a motorized wheelchair, said he had a dangerous and scary experience when he tried last week to catch a bus from his College Park home to get to a store in the Hyattsville area. The sidewalks were cleared, but curb cuts along Baltimore Avenue and Jefferson Street were still covered in thick piles of ice and snow, so he couldn’t get his wheelchair over them.
“I couldn’t get back onto the sidewalk like everyone else,” he said.
Pervez, who works in communications at a nonprofit in D.C., drove his wheelchair for nearly a mile in the busy road. Eventually, he turned around and went back home because he worried about the danger.
“It was important enough for them to clear areas for walking people, but it wasn’t important for them to clear it enough for people like me in wheelchairs,” he said. “All that work and all that money, but no time was spent thinking about disabled people who want to go outside.”
Lindsay Latham of Springfield, Va., said she shoveled the sidewalks in front of four houses in her neighborhood to make sure they were accessible for her 11-year-old son, Calvin, who uses an adaptive stroller to get to school because he has cerebral palsy and a rare brain malformation.
“I was really shocked,” she said. “You had to go around parts of the sidewalk and get in the street. It’s hard enough for him to get to school and then it becomes like Mario Kart trying to get around these patterns of uncleared sidewalks where people didn’t shovel. It wasn’t safe for anyone, let alone for him.”
Kathy Murray, 74, who lives in Northwest Washington and walks with a cane after undergoing 14 operations on her knees and back, said she skipped outings to her church in Georgetown and other appointments because of the weather. She’s stayed inside her apartment, ordering grocery delivery online, watching movies and reading books. “I feel like a hermit in my apartment,” she said.
Susan Cohen, 80, who uses a motorized wheelchair because she has multiple sclerosis, said even though her caretaker and neighbors cleared a space outside her Georgetown home during the first week of the storm so she could be driven to medical appointments, plows came and pushed snow from the streets into the spot. After she sought help from her advisory neighborhood commissioner, city workers came back the second week with equipment to shovel the snow out of her spot.
“People worked for days to shovel me out,” she said, “but when the plows finally came, they dumped it right back in the spot they’d cleared, so then I was all blocked in again by mountains of snow.”
Rachel Weiner and Jenna Portnoy contributed to this report.
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