Dig Done!

Once the storm has passed, the aftermath always sucks, and it’s no exception here.

Metro went into a well-planned (for once) set of procedures to deal with the effects of the snow, shutting down all above-ground stations while the snow was at its peak, yet managing to resume a relatively normal MetroRail and MetroBus service today (Monday).

MetroAccess was shut down for Sunday, and operated pretty much only in the daylight today (Monday).  They hope they can resume normal service tomorrow (Tuesday) but the chances are they’re going to be having troubles given the scope of the storm.

As for our little corner of the region?

I covered the issues we were having with the aftermath in a previous post.  The biggest one outside our control was the lack of the road being plowed.  By 8:30 this morning, a plow had been down the road – mostly.

One bright spot to notice about this was the absence of the usual 4′ tall berm of snow on our side of the road, the normal leavings of the plows.  My guess is they were using some sort of fluid to clear the snow, as evidenced by the colored residue.

The plow however didn’t cover the length of the street.  In the end, our neighbors on one side went out and cleared the road more fully themselves, including linking the trench we’d dug out the day before to the now-plowed road itself.

It’s hard to fault the Department of Public Works, they were slammed hard (as was most of the region) and had to scramble – but there are still some questions we have about the entire process.

We had hoped to ask them this evening at the Town Council meeting, but – surprise – the sidewalks haven’t been cleared sufficiently for us to head to the Town Hall.

This is a different problem, and outside the Town’s control as well as our own – it’s the responsibility of residents to clear the sidewalks in front of their property, but they don’t always clear the full width.  There’s usually a wedge of ice on the far side of sidewalks that will tip a chair over if you hit it the wrong way – as I’ve found out by being dumped over the side of the kerb into a busy road in front of a dump truck a few years ago.

Thankfully the driver was taking care and stopped, else that would have gotten messy!

So we’re still unable to ask the Mayor and the Director of the Department of Public Works to explain why the top half of our street was plowed straight away, but the bottom half was left for a day longer before being cleared – even after the Council had been advised there were residents who were effectively trapped as a result (that would be us).

We also wanted to see if anyone had any idea how many other residents had been similarly isolated.

It’s not so much playing any sort of “blame game”.  I doubt very much if leaving the street unplowed was because there were wheelies at the end of it.  Usually with these things the problem boils down to “We never thought about that” and that’s where bringing incidents like this up has a purpose.

It’s only through learning by experience the errors of the past that they can be avoided in the future.

I call it “trial and terror”.

So anyways, hopefully the ice situation on sidewalks will be resolved in its natural course by tomorrow to some degree so we can avoid having to travel along two major highways, actually on the roads themselves, to get anywhere.

I’ll leave you with these pictures of the road and how it looks cleared off.

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