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| Forget ISIS. The most powerful city on earth can’t handle a dusting of snow. | |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| As we’ve proven before, we’re not good at snow. And on Wednesday night, we proved it again in utterly humiliating fashion, morphing from a powerful city of powerful people to a demolition-derby, wagon-training cold mess. | As we’ve proven before, we’re not good at snow. And on Wednesday night, we proved it again in utterly humiliating fashion, morphing from a powerful city of powerful people to a demolition-derby, wagon-training cold mess. |
| A one-inch snowtastrophe involving at least 1,000 accidents, eight-hour commutes and cars abandoned on freeways by desperate, disgusted commuters. Some people hadn’t even made it home by dawn Thursday. | |
| [An inch of snow, icy roads unleash nine hours of D.C. traffic chaos] | [An inch of snow, icy roads unleash nine hours of D.C. traffic chaos] |
| Our commander in chief was equally powerless in the face of the fluff, as it took his lights-and-sirens motorcade nearly two hours to make the usually 30-minute commute from Joint Base Andrews to the White House. | |
| It was a nearly perfect deja vu of Snowmaggedon 2011, which generated epic Twitter travelogues of misery. Only difference this time? It was more fun to Snapchat the whole calamity. | |
| Didn’t we learn a thing back then? Apparently not. | Didn’t we learn a thing back then? Apparently not. |
| Scarier still: A monster snowstorm is expected to arrive Friday. It’s never good when The Post’s Capital Weather Gang uses words such as “paralyzing” and “historic” to describe a snow event. | |
| We were so fixated on the impending snow doom that we weren’t expecting Wednesday night’s little prelude. Too busy rescheduling meetings, raiding every market’s supply of milk, bread and wine, arguing over cute names for the coming storm, and holding news conferences about preparation. | |
| It’s the preemptive strike that destroyed us. Isn’t that always the way? | |
| Where’s the War College for snow preparation? Shouldn’t we get it in the loop? Because we desperately need a better strategy for these annual sneak attacks from the skies. | |
| While everyone was preparing for the snow, dispatching trucks to the outer ’burbs, amassing a snow army of shovelers to keep the sidewalks clean, a quick little clipper of precipitation came in and soaked the roads, which became ice rinks once the temperatures dropped. | |
| The roads turned to black ice because they were untreated. One set of officials said they didn’t treat them because the mini-storm was predicted to be no more than a squall. Others said that predictions called for temperatures so low that the pre-treatment they squirt on roads would freeze, making them more dangerous. | |
| What happened to good-old road salt for conditions like this? | |
| Sure, it’s easy to Monday-morning quarterback this whole thing. District Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) apologized Thursday. | |
| “We are very sorry for the inadequate response,” she said. “We did not provide adequate resources at a time when it could have made a difference with the commute.” | “We are very sorry for the inadequate response,” she said. “We did not provide adequate resources at a time when it could have made a difference with the commute.” |
| She and other public officials vowed to do better. But the truth is, it’s a national disgrace and an ongoing embarrassment that we are so bad at dealing with snow. We spend a bazillion dollars on military drones and planes to deploy stealth strikes, yet the heart of all our operations can be crippled by a single inch of white crystals. | She and other public officials vowed to do better. But the truth is, it’s a national disgrace and an ongoing embarrassment that we are so bad at dealing with snow. We spend a bazillion dollars on military drones and planes to deploy stealth strikes, yet the heart of all our operations can be crippled by a single inch of white crystals. |
| It makes little municipal sense to bust a budget on a Midwestern-style snow force. But the federal presence here should command a more muscular response. Every couple of years, we lose millions in federal workforce hours, insurance, school closings. Wouldn’t it be worth it to finally get this right? | |
| We’re all worried about ISIS when the truth is, all it takes to destroy us is a little ice. | We’re all worried about ISIS when the truth is, all it takes to destroy us is a little ice. |
| Twitter: @petulad | Twitter: @petulad |
| Read more Petula Dvorak: | Read more Petula Dvorak: |
| The war on a treehouse — and childhood itself | The war on a treehouse — and childhood itself |
| Virginia Sen. Creigh Deeds is using a $6 million lawsuit over his son’s suicide to force change | |
| Our 10-year-old decided to give ice hockey a try. What we encountered was dreadful. | Our 10-year-old decided to give ice hockey a try. What we encountered was dreadful. |
| Meet two amazing women who are still working at the age of 102. Yes, 102. | Meet two amazing women who are still working at the age of 102. Yes, 102. |