FAIRFAX, Va. — Coming off two busier-than-usual winters, road crews in Virginia are getting ready for anything and everything.
The Virginia Department of Transportation gave its yearly snow briefing Thursday, which included general predictions for the coming winter as well as advice for residents to be prepared.
“There’s slightly better than normal odds for milder temperatures this winter, and more precipitation” in the Mid-Atlantic region, said National Weather Service meteorologist Chris Strong.
Still, he said even during a warmer, wetter winter, the conditions needed for a snowstorm could quickly materialize. He also warned that it’s not just big storms that cause problems for drivers.
“If you have road temperatures in the 20s, and you throw any amount of light, measurable snow on top of that, combined with traffic around here, you could have bad things happen very quickly,” Strong said.
Others, including NBC Washington Chief Meteorologist Doug Kammerer, think our region could see “above average” snowfall this winter.
In the event of snow, VDOT says its improved snowplow-tracking website could prove valuable.
“Basically it’s a tool that allows you to check where every truck is in real time,” said Branco Vlacich, VDOT’s district maintenance engineer for Northern Virginia. “You can do it not only where you live, but where you plan to go.”
The website, vdotplows.org, will only become active when 2 inches of snow are in the forecast.
Vlacich says if between 2 and 4 inches of snow has fallen, the goal is to clear roads within 24 hours, and within 48 hours for 6 inches or more.
He says it is essential that drivers stay off the roads to allow plow operators to meet those goals.
Residential streets will not be fully cleared, but instead made passable. To VDOT, “passable” means that a rear-wheel drive vehicle could go down the road without any difficulty. But residents might not see pavement, the agency warns.
VDOT leaders also remind residents to make sure their cars and trucks are ready for bad weather, keep at least a half tank of gas in them at all times along with plenty of windshield washer fluid and tires with good tread.
Others in our area have already been getting ready for winter. In Prince George’s County, drivers took snow plows for a test run in October. In D.C., leaders have assembled a stockpile of rock salt, and thousands of gallons of beet juice to treat roads and sidewalks. And the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission is preparing for the possibility of cold weather leading to more water main breaks.
Northern Virginia snow removal planning by the numbers:
- 350 interstate lane miles will be pretreated before a snowfall
- 500 lane miles of major roads will be pretreated before a snowfall including Fairfax County Parkway, U.S. Routes 1, 29, and 50 and Virginia Routes 7 and 28
- 4,000 trucks and plows available through contractors and VDOT staff
- 340,000 tons of salt on hand
- 95,000 tons of sand on hand
- 576,000 gallons of liquid treatments on hand
- 16,000 subdivision streets to be cleared
- 18,000 total lane miles to be cleared
- $70.7 million — this year’s snow removal budget for Northern Virginia
