Posted on 01/04/2022 7:09:15 AM PST by C19fan
Drivers were stuck on an interstate near Washington, D.C., after a major snowstorm struck the East Coast.
Hundreds of drivers were stuck on Interstate 95 in Virginia for hours, with some claiming to have been there for over 19 hours after one of the state's largest snowfalls in years.
The jam was so bad that "some people were seen abandoning their vehicles in snow-covered travel lanes, walking down I-95 to parts unknown," according to WTOP traffic reporter Dave Dildine, describing the incident as a "worst-case scenario."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonexaminer.com ...
Look at it this way. Despite warnings, Senator Tim Keane took off on his one hour commute to DC yesterday and has been stuck for 19 hours on I-95.
When my dad retired, they moved to FL and told me they’d pay for fuel if I wanted to follow. I was 19. We left MA in Dec and hit snow less than half way down to FL. Don’t know what state it was but those people could not drive in the snow. Maybe a couple of inches and people were sliding off the road left and right while we just cruised right on through.
The drivers in Virginia have enough trouble in perfectly clear weather.
My brother was stationed at Ft Campbell and they got a dusting once - and the entire town shut down.
This is a major flaw in the otherwise excellent Interstate Highway System: An accident can tie up traffic for hours. Maybe something like an "access road" could be added as an alternate route around a traffic accident.
Well, most of the commuters to D.C. are woke swamp people who are blinded by the Trump rage, making it difficult to drive.
The alternate routes to this stretch of I95 are:
US1, which is also a parking lot.
A bunch of two-lane country roads with no shoulders, bad pavement, and lots of hills and curves. These roads suck to drive on even in clear weather.
Not sure what the problem was 30 years ago but they were terrible drivers back then too.
I grew up in a little town a few miles south of Buffalo that was one of the Thruway exits. When they shut down the Thruway (often), travelers were taken off the highway to the next closest exist. We had strangers sleeping in our church pews for two or three days at a time.
I lived in Alaska for 20 years after high school. NOTHING in the Anchorage area of Alaska was as extreme or treacherous as Buffalo lake-effect snow blizzards.
The underlying problem in DC and NoVa is that, while we do get occasional snow, serious snowstorms are infrequent and it melts off quickly. That has obvious implications for the level of preparedness that is appropriate. How much money do you want your local government to spend on equipment that is needed for about three days every six years?
Once in awhile, a nor’easter decides to take a dump on us, and does. I live in DC. I was here in ‘79, when we got the second worst snowstorm on record. I was here for the infamous Superbowl storms, when Marion Barry chose to run off and hobnob in sunny climes with the rest of the glitterati while DC got hit by 12” and 13” snows two days apart. I was here for Snowmageddon, which is the storm the Millennials remember.
We have been overdue for a good snowstorm. What we got yesterday was a decent but not especially large storm. I get the impression that a number of our local governments seriously fumbled their response. That was certainly the case here on Capitol Hill. My younger daughter is home from college and is working as many hours as she can at her ongoing local jobs in order to support her lavish student lifestyle when she gets back to school. Her job is two miles away. I ventured out about 3:30 to drop her off. It was awful. Even main streets on Capitol Hill had not been touched. This was 4-5 hours after the storm tapered off in late morning. No plows, no sand, no salt. Being a freeper, I am of course mild mannered and soft spoken, but by the time I got home, I was uttering words I never thought would escape my lips, “This makes Marion Barry look good.”
But it will all be melted off in a couple of days.
My favorite local snow story: The Woodrow Wilson bridge carries the beltway/I-95 over the Potomac River. DC today consists of 63 square miles north of the river due to the long-ago retrocession of the Virginia portions of the original District of Columbia. But if you look at the original map of DC, the eastern corner of the original District projects several miles downriver and includes the Woodrow Wilson bridge.
The northern approaches to the bridge run for several miles through Maryland. The southern approaches to the bridge run several miles through Virginia. The bridge itself is technically in DC. One year when we had a serious storm, the Maryland people cleared the Maryland approaches and the Virginia people cleared the Virginia approaches, but no one cleared the bridge itself, which created a snarl that lasted several days.
P.S. My daughter’s pace of work closed early. I told her to walk home. Yes, the roads were that bad. It was only two miles, and she was walking with a friend most of the way.
All season tires are only good for an inch or two of snow if relatively new. After that they have the same performance as summer performance tires.
In the end, nothing changed.
An attorney from the Office of Civil Rights soon called. He said the conversation lasted more than an hour. But in August, he got an email notifying him his concerns would not be investigated. Students were required to make complaints within 180 days, the letter said.
He was surprised, he said and crushed. He had let himself hope again.
LOL! Your Woodrow Wilson Bridge story is a poster child for the Fuster Cluck of DC!
Good thing nobody was in a Tesla
Most snow plows in Northern Virginia are contract plows. I haven’t seen an actual VDOT plow for years.
Typically here in Va they do start plowing early and keep it up. This time I have not heard what the initial problem was this time.
Having lived in NY, NJ, WI and others I can testify that Northerners do not drive any better in snow than Southerners. Up north you can usually see a pile of cars in the median and ditches after the storm waiting for the tow trucks. And ya it seems most of them are SUVs, apparently they thought they were safer than 2 wheel drives!
And that’s fine. My point is that the three jurisdictions need to coordinate on routes.
Keeping the interstates clear is obviously a top priority. In a major storm, they are likely to be revisited repeatedly, starting with pre-treatment before the snow begins and then again periodically for the duration.
From a rational planning perspective, it would be obviously absurd for DC to send snowplows trundling repeatedly along secondary routes in MD or VA to reach a very short, isolated downstream bridge.
Virginia plows rolling north up I-495/I-95 should continue across the river, then loop back at the first appropriate cloverleaf and clear the southbound lanes on their way back. Or MD plows should do the same thing in reverse.
DC would then compensate by adjusting a few of its own routes. A DC plow could clear the 14th Street bridge, then turn along the GW Parkway and return via the Memorial Bridge , clearing a couple of miles of VA road in the process. Or a DC plow could run a bit further up Connecticut or Wisconsin Avenues or Bladensburg Road, and return by a sensible route.
The highway people in all three jurisdictions prepare these route maps in advance. They need to talk to each other. I assume that they usually do. I never did find out how the ball got dropped in that particular instance, or why it took so long to get sorted out. Once I-95 got hopelessly snarled, of course, it took days to remove all the cars so plows could get through. A little advance planning goes a long way.
VDOT doesn’t even seem to coordinate with itself on clearing routes. A few years ago, a week after the snowstorm (it hadn’t gotten above freezing), there were still unplowed turn lanes and acceleration lanes.
Thank you for fixing the link.
And listening to Chris Plante this morning, I got a good laugh at all of the Dems demanding that “governor [elect]” Youngkin do something about the I-65 jam. Apparently they forgot that their blackface & KKK robe wearing Democrapt governor Northam is still in charge of the state until Youngkin’s inauguration on Jan 14.
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