Second wave of snow heads for D.C. area after major storm forces closures, cancellations
Second wave of snow falls on D.C. area after major storm forces closures, cancellations
(35 minutes later)
A second wave of snow appeared headed for the Washington region late Thursday afternoon, piling atop what already was the winter’s most significant snowfall and threatening to bury once more streets, sidewalks and parked cars cleared since the first snow ended in the morning.
The most significant snowfall in the Washington region since the infamous “Snowmageddon” of 2010 descended with a double bite Thursday, punctuating a winter already cold, harsh and relentless.
“We now believe there is a chance heavy snow will return to much of the D.C. area after about 4 p.m.,” The Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang said, citing a second heavy snowfall in Roanoke, Va. “Precipitation may begin as rain and/or sleet, but should change to snow. Accumulations of one to four inches are possible, and we cannot rule out locally heavier amounts.”
The weather had a familiar, nasty character, beginning overnight and into the morning with snow, then turning to sleet and rain in many places. A few hours after that ended — barely time enough for street and sidewalk clearing and the digging out of cars — the snow returned for a second round, perhaps mixing with sleet here and there.
The first bad weather — a nasty combination of snow, sleet and punishing wind --descended on Washington before dawn Thursday to find that the region had shut down for the day.
The federal government shut down, air travel stopped and most of the region ground to a halt.
After a winter of smaller stuff, it was — finally — a regionwide wallop.
The storm was blamed for at least one death. A Virginia Department of Transportation contract truck driver working to clear roads died after he was struck by another VDOT truck in Ashburn. Virginia State Police said 32-year-old Lovo Guevara Geovany Arnoldo of Vienna pulled off the road and was standing behind his truck when he was hit by the second VDOT truck. He was taken to a hospital, where he died. The other driver was not injured.
The snow that fell overnight and into Thursday morning blanketed Washington, shuttering local schools, government offices and airports and leaving highways treacherous for the few who dared to venture onto them.
By Thursday evening, many of the region’s major school systems had announced they would be closed for a second day Friday, creating a five-day vacation for schoolchildren, who have Monday off for President’s Day.
Warned by reports of how the same storm brought life to a standstill Wednesday in several Southern states, the bad weather arrived here overnight to find a region resigned to the same fate.
For 17-month-old Evalyn Heyman, Thursday brought her first real frolic in the snow. “She loves it,” Leigh Heyman, 42, said as his daughter played on 13th Street in Northwest Washington. “She clearly has Northern parents. She got the whole walking-on-ice thing pretty quickly.”
The miserable mix was forecast to continue in some places through the day, according to the Capital Weather Gang, with clearing expected for Valentine’s Day, followed by a chance of light snow Friday night and Saturday.
The winter weather was forecast to persist into the pre-dawn hours of Friday. Sunshine was expected to bring some melting during the day, but there was the prospect of more light snow later Friday and on Saturday.
Power outages — that bane of bad weather — were surprisingly absent by midday Wednesday, but utility companies stood ready for problems if ice and freezing rain topped the heavy snow to bring down their lines.
With more snow on the way as night fell Thursday, Dulles International Airport had recorded more than a foot of snow; Olney, Md., had 15 inches; eight inches had come down on Northeast D.C.; seven in Alexandria; 16 in Germantown, Md.; and 13 in Oakton, Va. Snowfall generally was lighter to the east of the District, although Crofton, Md., had eight inches.
While there were no major road accidents with fewer drivers out on the highways, there was one reported fatality related to the weather.
The bad weather spread across the eastern states, bombarding them with the same snow and ice that paralyzed much of the South on Wednesday. More than 6,000 flights were canceled, most of them in Atlanta, Philadelphia, New York and the Washington region’s three major airports.
A Virginia Department of Transportation contract worker was killed while clearing snow on Belmont Ridge Road in Ashburn, state police said. The man had pulled his truck onto the shoulder of the roadway shortly before 6 a.m. and was standing near the vehicle’s rear spreader when he was struck by a VDOT dump truck, police said.
Virginia State Police said they had responded to more than 3,300 calls for assistance statewide, and there were scores of disabled vehicles in Northern Virginia.
Metro shut down its service on 250 bus routes throughout the area early Thursday because officials were worried about road conditions.
Power outages — that bane of bad weather — were surprisingly absent through much of Thursday, but utility companies stood ready overnight if ice and freezing rain topped the heavy snow to bring down lines.
Several Metro bus routes were expected to reopen by 2 p.m. Thursday along major roadways, officials said.
In a region given to bashing weather forecasters for getting it wrong, there was little for the cynics to complain about this time.
In a region given to bashing weather forecasters for getting it wrong, there was little for the cynics to complain about this time around.
“I never really believed it,” James Beaner, 40, said of the forecast. “I didn’t think it was going to stop anyone from doing anything.”
“I never really believed it,” James Beaner, 40, said of the forecast. “I didn’t think it was going to stop anyone from doing anything.”
He commuted from St. Mary’s County to downtown Washington, where he works as a manager at a pizza restaurant.
Almost 1,000 flights from the region’s airports were canceled Thursday, and the Brock family had planned to be on one of them. The snow hardly curbed their excitement as they waited at Reagan National Airport in hope of getting a flight to their vacation in Miami.
“I actually made it in good time today,” Beaner said as he waited for a train at the Branch Avenue Metro station.
Still, Heidi Brock, 50, was thankful for being in a “great entertainment spot” for her young son, motioning to the snow removal process in progress on the closed runways.
Some of his family and friends stayed home from their jobs, and he said some of them gave him a hard time about going in to work. He had a choice, but some others did not.
“With a 6-year-old boy, there’s nothing more interesting than airplanes and dump trucks,” she said.
Joel Ramos, 33, was headed for a Glover Park restaurant, where he prepares food.
American Airlines Flight 1575 was the only one to Chicago that had not been canceled.
“It’s nice for the people who don’t have to work, but they are the people who will need to eat out today, and we have to open the restaurant,” said Ramos, who shivered from the cold outside the Friendship Heights Metro Station.
When the flight crew arrived about an hour before the 5:20 p.m. scheduled departure, the passengers started to cheer.
“There is no choice,” he said. “We need to make it to work. We have to be responsible.”
“It’s crazy to see all the cancellations, and then ours is the only one on schedule,” said Matt Bordner, 19, of Dakota, Ill., population 500.
The Tastee Diner in Bethesda maintained its 44-year tradition of staying open 24-7, except for Christmas Day.
With schools and most workplaces closed Thursday, people spent the day shoveling snow. But Lloyd Hepner, 72, of Strasburg, Va., was in business.
“Snowmageddon, you name it, we’ve been here,” said manager Beth Cox.
“I can make $4,000 to $5,000 in a day,” Hepner said, leaning on his shovel after 20 hours of work. “Four to five inches of snow works good, but this is too much.”
Owner Gene Wilkes, who lives in Dickerson, near Sugar Loaf Mountain, had to push through three-foot snow drifts on country roads that hadn’t seen plows yet. Another employee with a four-wheel drive vehicle picked up other workers.
Asked how he was able to work for so long, the former Chantilly, Va., resident just smiled.
“We’ve had an action plan since Tuesday night — backup people, people on call, having people stay close by, and people close by working double shifts,” Cox said.
“I guess I’m used to it,” Hepner said.
“The phone is ringing off the hook with people asking ‘Are you open? Are you open?’ ” Cox said. “There are people who have to be out in this weather — firefighters, police officers, anyone who needs to work 24 hours — and they need a place to eat, and they know we’re always here.”
Justin Williams, 19, and his friend Melvin Anderson, 18, saw snow as a moneymaking possibility, too, as they walked through Fort Washington, Md., with large shovels over their shoulders. But they said only one person in the 11 houses they called on had cash to pay their $25 fee. Everyone else offered checks or credit cards.
Snow totals varied considerably, but most residents reported significantly more of the white stuff — between eight and 15 inches — than they had seen since the Snowmageddon winter four years ago. The National Weather Service reported 11 inches of snow in Rockville and 12 in Kensington as of 6 a.m. There were about six inches of snow at Ronald Reagan National Airport, 9.5 inches in Arlington, 11 inches in Herndon, 14 inches at Fairfax Station and 12.5 inches in Rockville.
“Nah. man, I ain’t taking nobody’s check to shovel no snow,” Williams said. “How is it no one has any cash out here?”
Jane Beard, 58, is a weather geek. She reads forecasting models and charts, and she is a fan of Big Weather.
The piles of snow next to Will Smith’s Volvo XC90 stood nearly as tall as his SUV, but the 29-year-old had managed to do what almost no one else on his block in Fairfax County had done: dig out his car.
So on Thursday, outside her home in the Colesville area of Silver Spring, Beard was delighted by the measurement she took of the snowfall: 13 inches.
Smith said the excavation was backbreaking. When asked how long it took, he had to stop and calculate. He finally offered a tally: 90 minutes.
Still, there was a ways to go. It was only half of what she had recorded as the record snowfall in her yard: 26 inches, during Snowmageddon.
“I was joking with my wife that they put camping chairs in parking spots in Chicago to save them after they dig their cars out,” Smith said. “I was going to leave a little mound of snow in my spot with my shovel stuck in it, so no one parks in it.”
“If it were going to snow, we might as well have something to talk about,” said Beard, who works as a business consultant.
The snow was play for Irina Yakadina, 42, and her son, 15-year-old Ilya Besancon. They crafted a motorcycle to accompany the myriad snowmen that others had erected in Logan Circle.
Metro officials said rail ridership during its normally bustling morning rush hour was “anemic” Thursday, with only 6 percent of the riders on trains compared to the same time period last Thursday.
“We’re just kind of putting a lot of snow together, and then we’re going to shape it to have wheels, a seat, a front and a back,” Besancon said.
Renbin Yang, 31, ventured out to the College Park-U. of Md. Metro station, forced to take the train to his job at the National Institutes of Health rather than the bus, which was canceled. Originally from China, Yang estimated that the overnight accumulation was the most snow he has ever seen.
They said they walked from their home to Logan Circle in hopes of enjoying the product of Mother Nature’s onslaught, rather than being paralyzed by it.
“When I walked here, I thought, ‘Can I make it to the station?’ ” Yang said with a laugh as he waited for a train. “That is one of the advantages of the trains over the buses. They’re less influenced by the weather, more reliable.”
“Fantastic. Beautiful. It’s a true snow where you can really build stuff,” Yakadina said. “How much better can it get?”
J.E. McNeil, 62, a contract attorney headed to K and 14th streets, walked through small mountains of snow from her Garrison Street NW home to the Friendship Heights Metro five long blocks away.
Yakadina said she was in D.C. during Snowmageddon and remembered college-age kids erecting igloos in Logan Circle.
“I am tired,” she whispered, stopping in the middle of Harrison Street NW, where there was still no sign of snow plows. The sidewalks weren’t much better. She kept going, bundled up in a green coat, a black hat on, and carrying a backpack with extra food, as well as an extra book and a purse. She was prepared, she said, in case she is stranded downtown after work.
“Is the official name Snow-chi?” she said, referencing the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. “We can send some [snow] over to Sochi, actually.”
“There’s been more bad days than this,” she said recalling Snowmageddon and snow walls as high as her waist. “But don’t get me wrong, this is a pain in the neck.”
But for those who live on the streets, bad weather is not a time for fun.
McNeil had appointments that couldn’t miss. And an hourly pay, too, she said.
The organization that runs the emergency shelter for men in Montgomery County reported a record number of people seeking their services Wednesday night. After averaging 178 men this winter, they took in 198.
“Thank you, Metro!” She said. “For a lot of people it is so important to get to work and Metro and their workers really make it happen.”
In Arlington County, emergency shelters for single adults that are typically open only for the night stayed open throughout the cold and snowy day Thursday, said Kathy Sibert, executive director of the Arlington Street People’s Assistance Network.
Early Thursday, all runways were closed at Ronald Reagan National Airport and Washington Dulles International Airport. But one runway reopened at Dulles shortly after 12:30 p.m.
“We always find a way to make room,” she said. “We never turn anyone away.”
More than 300 flights were canceled at Reagan, along with 201 at Dulles and 123 at Baltimore-Washington International Airport, according to FlightAware, a Houston-based flight tracking company.
The District is one of only a handful of jurisdictions nationwide, including New York City and Massachusetts, that gives residents a legal right to shelter on nights when temperatures drop below freezing.
The terminal at Dulles was deserted. Clearly, travelers had heeded advice to check with their airlines before making what would have been a long, snowy and ultimately fruitless trek to the airport.
The Homeless Children’s Playtime Project brought activity packets to snowed-in children at D.C. General on Thursday. Jamila Larson, who is with the group, said children have few places to play inside the shelter and no place to play outside, save for a parking lot and a sidewalk near a methadone clinic.
Some international flights already en route were diverted to other airports. A United flight from Dubai was sent to Chicago; an Emirates flight also from Dubai was directed to Pittsburgh.
“A snow day for kids at the shelter isn’t the same as a snow day for most kids,” she said. “They have nothing to do.”
With his flight home to Nashville canceled, Rich Hayes left his hotel in Mount Vernon on what should have been an easy errand: getting a cup of coffee.
Debbi Wilgoren, Matt Zapotosky, Julie Zauzmer, Dan Morse, Theresa Vargas, Michael E. Ruane. T. Rees Shapiro, Michael Rosenwald, Katherine Shaver, Caitlin Gibson, Steve Hendrix, Patrick Svitek, Emma Brown, Patricia Sullivan, Martin Weil, Susan Svrluga, Paul Duggan, Keith Alexander, Antonio Olivo, Michael A. Chandler, Lynh Bui, Luz Lazo, Lori Aratani, Mike DeBonis, Mark Berman, Justin Jouvenal, Brigid Schulte, Katherine Shaver, Donna St. George, Victoria St. Martin, Laura Vozzella, John Wagner, Ovetta Wiggins and Clarence Williams contributed to this report.
Eight blocks later, he found one.
The 45-year-old trudged through snow and slush, pulling a blue suitcase, from 8th Street, near the Convention Center, to 16th and K streets NW. There he found the first open Starbucks — actually, nearly the first open anything — in blocks. It was past 9 a.m.
“It was pretty much a no mans land,” said Hayes, who was at least walking toward his nonprofit’s office near the Farragut West Metro station. “I foolishly skipped the hotel breakfast. I thought this would be easy.”
More than a foot of snow blanketed the quiet village of Middleburg in Loudoun County, where the Common Grounds coffee shop, the post office and the Safeway were the only businesses open. By 9:30 a.m., John Deere tractors worked to clear Route 50, which cuts through the center of town, as snow continued to fall in flakes the size of jelly beans.
Since Common Grounds opened at 6 a.m., a total of 13 customers had come in for the drip-brewed coffee and lattes, said owner Cyndi Ellis.
“We thought if guys are out plowing, at least we’d be open to get them food or a hot drink if they need it,” said Common Grounds owner Cyndi Ellis. “It’s a lot of snow. The worst I’ve seen in years. But I can sit here all day. It’s warm.”
After a tricky walk over unshoveled sidewalks in a quest for the milk, orange juice and eggs she thought her husband had bought the night before, Veronica Leres arrived at the Tacoma Park grocery store only to find it dark.
“Oh no,” said Lares, pushing futilely on the locked doors of the Tacoma Park Silver Spring Food Coop. “I’ll have to go to the 7-Eleven. We used to be ready for snow, but it hasn’t been so snowy lately. I think we forgot what it’s like.”
One urgent task, come snow, sleet, or rain: dogs must be walked.
Robert Walters, 48, trudged through the combination of what seemed like all three forms of precipitation with his black and white border collie, Samantha, on Nebraska Avenue, in Northwest Washington.
Except for Samantha, “I’d be drinking coffee and watching TV right now,” he said, as the excited dog strained at the leash. “Dogs must be walked.”
Walters, who is self employed, found the storm “overdue,” he said. “It’s the winter.” He said it was Samantha’s first real snow storm. The dog lunged away as he spoke. “Until she finds a place where she can go, this could be an all-day adventure.”
As the snow switched over to rain and the wind picked up, Julie Kirtz, 54, strode down the middle of deserted McKinley Street NW.
“It’s gorgeous,” she said. “I love it, absolutely love it. I grew up in California, moved to Alaska.”
“I have to go back and sit in front of my computer all day, so it’s time to get out and enjoy it,” she said.
She said she was not surprised at the amount of snow that had fallen. “I figured it was going to be a lot. My kids are home. We’re good.”
Matt Zapotosky, Julie Zauzmer, Dan Morse, Theresa Vargas, Michael E. Ruane. T. Rees Shapiro, Michael Rosenwald, Katherine Shaver, Caitlin Gibson, Steve Hendrix, Patrick Svitek, Emma Brown, Patricia Sullivan, Martin Weil, Susan Svrluga, Paul Duggan, Antonio Olivo, Michael A. Chandler, Lynh Bui, Luz Lazo, Lori Aratani, Mike DeBonis, Mark Berman, Donna St. George, Laura Vozzella, John Wagner, Ovetta Wiggins and Clarence Williams contributed to this report.
