In D.C. area, outages, snow plowing conspire against normal week ahead

The big dig-out that will send the snowbound Washington region back to work and school will take several days, and a nuisance snowstorm forecast for Tuesday could keep some suburban areas paralyzed even longer, officials said Saturday.

"We think it will be Tuesday or Wednesday before people can think about getting to work," said Sean T. Connaughton, Virginia's secretary of transportation.

It might be almost as long before power is restored to thousands of homes and businesses after the heavy snow and high winds conspired to topple trees across power lines throughout the region. Streets impassable even for utility companies' massive vehicles amplified the challenge.

"Crews are en route to a lot of outage points, but it's hard to get to them, so we are working with the counties and the District [governments] and their plows to get us there," Pepco spokesman Andre Francis said. "We need them to clear the roads so we can get to the places where we need to go to restore power."

The situation left tens of thousands to wonder when their predicaments would end and what their best strategy might be until then. In a Rockville neighborhood where many residents had lost power and heat, some families stayed put and hoped for the best.

But Jan Sealover and her partner decided to head out on foot -- maybe to a friend's house or a hotel. Sealover could not help but recall a winter storm in the late 1990s when she lived without heat for three or four days.

"You could see your breath," she said. "It began to feel very Dickensian." This time, she was thinking, "Why tough it out for two days and then leave?"

About 88,000 Pepco customers were without power as of 10 p.m. Saturday, including 78,000 in Montgomery County, 7,700 in Prince George's County and 2,200 in the District. Baltimore Gas and Electric said about 11,000 customers in Prince George's, Howard and Anne Arundel counties were without power. In Northern Virginia, Dominion Power reported about 48,000 customers without electricity.



"We are dealing with our most severe winter storm in years, one that not only interrupts electric service to our customers but also poses extreme challenges to the crews working to restore that service," said Paul D. Koonce, chief executive of Dominion Virginia Power.

Miles of roads to plow

In addition to plowing state and interstate highways, the Virginia Department of Transportation is responsible for removing snow on 9,000 miles of residential streets in Northern Virginia. Efforts to clear them could be delayed if equipment is diverted back to major highways Tuesday if there is a light snowfall.

In Maryland, the state plows all numbered highways; county and local governments clear other roads.

"We are estimating that it will take until midnight Sunday to complete plowing operations on primary roads," said Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett (D), whose crews have 5,000 lane miles to clear. "At that time, we will begin plowing operations on secondary roads, which should take until midnight on Monday. Only then can we begin snow removal in neighborhoods."

A challenge that prolongs the plowing process in a storm of this magnitude is the question of where to put all the snow. There are limits to how much can be plowed to the shoulder and the curb.

"Right now, we're pushing it to the sides," Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) said Saturday after he reached a command center south of Baltimore. "Right now, the best we can do is keep one lane open. But during the recovery operation afterward, we're going to have to truck the snow away and dump it in fields."

Leggett said the problem was already affecting operations in Montgomery.

"There is nowhere to push plowed snow in many neighborhoods, so it will have to be removed," Leggett said. "Hauling snow out of neighborhoods is very labor- and equipment-intensive and will take longer."

Calling in carters

The process of loading mounds of snow into dump trucks was also underway in Virginia, Connaughton said.

"We can't just pile it up along the interstates," he said. "So we've had to divert resources from actual shoveling to transport the snow to other locations."

About 90 percent of VDOT's snow removal is handled by contractors. Joan Morris, the agency's spokeswoman for Northern Virginia, said every major contractor in the region had been enlisted to provide trucks to cart away snow.

In the District, where open fields are in short supply, some snow is trucked to lots beneath expressways, and the rest is pushed into street corner snow mountains.

"Downtown, there will be big mounds of snow at the intersections when this is over," said Karyn LeBlanc of the D.C. Department of Transportation. "It will interfere with sight lines, and people will get impatient."

With the forecast for the week showing high temperatures just a few degrees above freezing, the snow might not melt until after Valentine's Day, but Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell said that could lead to another problem.



"As these record snows melt in Northern Virginia and the [Shenandoah] Valley, there is the risk of flooding," he said, "So we'll be feeling this impact for quite a while."

Another legacy of the storm will last well into spring and summer: Even before a heavy snowfall last weekend, a minor midweek storm and this weekend's monster event, Virginia and Maryland had outspent their snow-removal budgets, and the District was closing in on its budgeted amount.

Just one snowstorm -- the big one that began Dec. 19 -- cost the District about $4 million of its $6.2 million annual snow budget. It cost Northern Virginia about $10 million of the $27.6 million budget, and Maryland laid out $20 million of the $26 million in the State Highway Administration's snow budget.

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