WASHINGTON — On a 70-degree Tuesday in Montgomery County, local council members convened in Rockville to review the state and county’s snow removal teams during the Blizzard of 2016.
Council members had so many questions, and so much material to get through, that they were restricted to two minutes when questioning panelists.
Many of the questions focused on the condition of state roads after the storm. Council members questioned the inaccuracy of the county’s snow maps and the struggles of its 311 phone service.
Under most conditions, when the state of Maryland sees 6 inches of snow or less on the roads, plow teams can get down to bare pavement in less than an hour, said Tom Fountain, a State Highway Administration representative.
During and after the blizzard, county and state roads were said to be in poor shape.
Fountain said the state met its goal of making most state roads passable, but there were still a lot of complaints.
“Passable just means that a vehicle can get through and can get from point A to point B,” Fountain said after the meeting.
“The goal is to get to bare pavement within four hours” after the snow stops falling, he said.
After the blizzard, for example, the volume of fallen snow began to outstrip the crews’ ability to move it. The removal process went from plowing to hauling.
When that happens, Fountain says, “there’s just so much snow [that] it has to be hauled, and it takes a lot of heavy equipment to move that stuff — in a lot of cases it’s even taller than the plows.”
Fountain says the hauling process takes an enormous amount of time: “For what a snowplow can do in an hour, it takes 10 hours to do when you have to haul snow.”
That cost $40 million, or $1 million for each inch of snow. All told, the blizzard dumped 38 inches of snow on Montgomery County.
President Barack Obama signed Maryland’s disaster declaration last week.
County Council President Nancy Floreen was told it’s not yet clear exactly how much money the county could see from that.
“So we hope that the check is in the mail,” she said. “Maybe, we’ll see.”
