WASHINGTON — A month after a big blizzard socked the region, the Virginia Department of Transportation took compliments and complaints this week, as Fairfax County tries to make sure the next big snowstorm is handled better.
“Every snow event really does provide us an opportunity to improve,” VDOT Northern Virginia maintenance leader Branco Vlacich told the Board of Supervisors.
One-third of county residents who reached out to Chairman Sharon Bulova’s office following the storm complained plows took too long to reach their streets. One-fifth complained their neighborhoods were not plowed well enough, and others expressed concerns that driveways or sidewalks were blocked by snow piled by plows.
“Six years ago [during Snowmageddon], we didn’t have very much at all of social media, Facebook or Twitter,” Bulova says. “This time, about 20 percent of all of our correspondence came through social media.”
But Supervisor Kathy Smith says social media only fueled frustrations for people in neighborhoods that ended up being plowed last during the massive storm.
“People that had their neighborhoods done were happy because they were done over and over,” she said. “What I was hearing from was neighborhoods that were totally missed. I happen to live in one of those.”
The final streets got passable routes the Thursday following the Friday-Saturday storm.
VDOT aims to get neighborhood streets “passable” within 48 hours of a storm that has up to 6 inches of snow. In some parts of Fairfax and Loudoun counties, this storm dropped more than 30 inches.
A passable path could still be snow covered, but would at least be enough for emergency vehicles to use. It may only be eight to ten feet wide.
“We have 16,000 neighborhoods, and the challenge here is how do you get everything done quicker,” Vlacich says.
The Board of Supervisors is also looking into better mobilizing volunteers to shovel sidewalks and bus stops.
VDOT says its drivers and contractors are trained to avoid pushing or dumping snow onto sidewalks, driveways or fire hydrants, but in some spots it can be unavoidable in a massive storm.
Even once sidewalks around Fairfax County Public Schools are clear, Assistant Superintendent Jeffrey Platenberg says schools need more to be able to open.
“We have over 800-some-odd individual trailers [at schools] … and we have to clear the pathways, and that’s pretty much manual labor,” he says.
Schools were closed for a week.
Several supervisors hope the county can offer some place for kids to go if there is another similar storm, so that parents who cannot afford to take that much time off work have an affordable option.
VDOT compares this storm not just to Snowmageddon in 2010, but also to the Blizzard of ’96.
The 2010 storm took about 10 days to have all roads clear, and the 1996 storm, when VDOT had less than a quarter of the number of contractors and employees on duty in Northern Virginia, took two weeks.
While Supervisor Pat Herrity says he heard more compliments for VDOT in this storm than any other, he says some luck helped.
“We had warm temperatures afterwards,” he says. “If we had had cold temperatures, we’d be in a whole different world of hurt.”
Although VDOT controls and maintains nearly all the roads in Fairfax County, the county is trying to address issues in urbanizing areas like the Mosaic District and Tysons.
Supervisor Linda Smyth is concerned about whether the right-sized equipment was available for the rare, massive amount of snow, and wants to make sure more options are available for people who are out walking as things begin to clear up.
