Virginia’s Department of Transportation has over 1,500 trucks across Northern Virginia responding to problematic roads and spots after snow earlier this week, and now it’s prepared to handle the light snow that swept across the D.C. region Friday night.
Ellen Kamilakis, a VDOT spokeswoman, said crews didn’t have to pretreat the area’s roads ahead of Friday night’s snow, because there’s still residual salt and sand that’s down from the last bout of snow.
“We have had crews out 24/7 since Saturday and they’re going to continue in that posture through this storm as well,” Kamilakis said.
In the aftermath of a winter weather event, the agency — which is responsible for many of the highways and residential streets across Northern Virginia — prioritizes interstates and what it considers high-volume secondary streets.
Then, crews work to make side streets passable, which Kamilakis defined as an 8- to 10-foot-wide vehicle path that’s drivable with caution. The agency said drivers shouldn’t expect to see bare pavement.
In a news release Friday, VDOT said over the next few days, crews will patrol roads “to treat for potential refreeze of wet pavement as snow and ice melt during the day.”
Road monitors with the agency check how the roads are doing, “and independently verifying that the roads meet the definition of passable,” Kamilakis said.
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It’s unlikely that giant pickup trucks are used on residential streets, Kamilakis said, because the roads are more narrow and not made to have heavy vehicles on them. Usually, it’s the smaller fleet of 1-ton pickups that service the neighborhoods.
“The best insurance policy for this is that we have AVL (automatic vehicle location) on the trucks, so we know that the trucks have been on everybody’s street,” Kamilakis said.
Once all of the streets meet the agency’s standard, crews begin working on areas that residents called in to express concerns about. Over 1,500 trucks tended to those areas Friday night, Kamilakis said.
Anyone can report a road problem online at my.vdot.virginia.gov, “and crews can go through and double check or verify and potentially put down more abrasives if need be,” Kamilakis said.
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