The Smorgasbord of Douglas Bell

Warning: I don’t really know where I’m going with this blog post, so bear with me. But I do know that I wanted to get one out, so here goes.

I lived through my first ever snowfall last December. Washington, DC had its first snow of the season on Saturday, December 5, and I actually got to be out in it–while the snow was falling–for the first time in my life. It was certainly an interesting experience, as I watched from my dorm room and trekked out in it briefly.

I flew home for Winter Break on Tuesday, December 15, rather late considering that my final final was the Friday before. But just three days later the huge nor’easter became the big news, hitting DC with a blizzard that dumped a foot to a foot and a half of snow on DC, crippling the Metro, canceling flights, etc. And thus my primary line of winter break smalltalk became about how lucky I was to make it out of DC unscathed before the storm hit.

Turns out that storm was just a warm-up act. In what has been dubbed as either the “snowpocalypse” or “snowmageddon” (I prefer the format, President Obama apparently prefers the latter), American University received 27.5 inches of the white stuff, compared with just 16 inches during the mid-December storm. This in addition to the 6 inches we had already received last Saturday (1/30) and about two inches we received overnight on Tuesday (2/2).

Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow last Tuesday and I’m going to begrudgingly give him some credit this time around.

I’ve been watching FOX 5 pretty much full time since Friday evening which has been doing a great job of tracking the storm and its effects on the DC region with full-time coverage from 2:00 PM-Midnight on Friday and 6:00 AM-11:30 PM on Saturday. Kudos to them for that and for live streaming their broadcasts online. Even so, this has been quite a storm, one that even my friends from Minnesota and New York have said has been the biggest they’ve ever seen.

But enough on thoughts for the moment, how about some hard facts? Here’s somewhat of a rundown of how this has been the perfect storm:

• The snowfall was a cold, wet snow–the kind that sticks. To trees. And power lines. And trees with branches right above power lines. Take the hint.
• We had thunder snow overnight between Friday and Saturday with snowfall rates of 2″-4″ per hour. I’ve sure never heard of “thunder snow” before this; it’s apparently exceedingly rare for this region.
• How many warnings do you want? At one point on Saturday we were under a winter storm warning, a blizzard warning, a gale warning, and a coastal flood advisory (primarily for the Maryland counties east of us near the Atlantic coast).
• Right after the snow ended, temperatures dipped down below freezing. Tonight we’ve got a low of 12˚, and tomorrow’s high will be only 34˚. That means the snow will be freezing and turning to ice, plowed-but-still-wet streets will become black ice, and don’t expect snow to melt anytime soon.
• Don’t look now, but we’ve got another round of snow coming on late Tuesday/early Wednesday, with a currently projected potential of 5″-6″ more. Let’s hope the projections for that round of snow don’t go up as fast as the projections for this weekend’s storm did.

However this is only going down in the official books as the fourth-largest snowfall to ever hit DC, due to the fact that the official records are taken at Reagan National Airport, which only got 17.8″. That still makes it the biggest storm since President’s Day 1979, when 18.7″ was measured that that site (which, for obvious reasons, did not carry the Reagan name.) But Reagan Airport was the only place in the region to see less than 20″ of snowfall. As I mentioned, AU got 27.5″. Dulles Airport got an all-time record of 32.4″. And the majority of the 30″-40″ records were north of us, in central Maryland, which apparently got the brunt of the storm.

I should actually back up a little bit to tell my fun story from Thursday evening. I’ve been meaning to get to Whole Foods over in Tenleytown since I got back here this semester, and the uncertainty of how much I would need to rely on myself this weekend prompted me to finally get over there on Thursday evening, at around 6:30 PM. There were checkout lines going down every single aisle all the way to the back of the store, which not only made it fun to try to actually get items off the shelves (which were, for the most part, still well-stocked), but my time in the 15-items-or-less express lane was exactly 20 minutes, end to end. I’d hate to imagine how long the wait was in the other lines! Of course, by the next day, identical scenes at supermarkets across the region were all over the news, this time with mostly empty shelves. Reminded me very much of an iconic scene of the video that I’ve embedded at the very end of this post.

The snow started rather innocently at around 10:30 AM on Friday morning, started to pick up stronger that evening, had the worst of it overnight, and then continued at a rather good pace throughout Saturday, tapering off at around 4:45 PM. AU canceled classes starting after 12 PM Noon on Friday, and subsequently canceled classes for yesterday, today, and now tomorrow as well. (Yay, considering I have twice as many classes on Mondays as I do on the other days of the week.)

But that’s not the least of it. Perhaps you’ve heard of the adage that Washington, DC freaks out when even a few snowflakes start falling–which is true. But that’s nothing compared to the anomalies that we’ve been seeing over the weekend.

• Metro has been restricted to serving underground stations only since 11 PM on Friday, and this is going to continue tomorrow (Monday) as well, even more than a day and a half after the snow stopped falling. (It is their policy to do this when the snow exceeds eight inches, making it impossible for their trains to receive power from the electric third-rail.)
• There has been absolutely no Metrobus service since 9 PM on Friday, though 18 routes will return to limited service on snow emergency routes tomorrow. Other regional bus services have been in the same predicament.
• All three DC region airports had little-to-no service whatsoever since Friday afternoon, and still may not have service until midday tomorrow at best.
• While AU avoided a power outage, at one point, 250,000 people in the region were without power. 60,000 were still without power, and the news is saying it may take until the end of the week to get power fully restored for many customers.
• There have been a significant number of roof collapses as the result of the snowfall, including an airplane hangar at Dulles Airport and one or two churches in Northeast DC. Absolutely devastating.
• Ploughs have been lucky to keep the snow emergency routes (primarily major thoroughfares) somewhat clear of snow–there’s still quite a lot of slush on many of them (which is bound to freeze). A lot of residential streets still have yet to see a single visit from a snowplough.
• Cars have been getting stuck all over the region. On Friday night at around 10 PM, I was watching FOX 5 as they had one of their reporters driving around Northwest DC (near Friendship Heights) and streaming with uStream, and just happened to drive by Senator Tom Daschle, whose sedan had gotten stuck. (They were able to give him a push.) And while I was writing this blog post earlier, a reporter in Bethesda, MD was trying to help about six other guys get a car unstuck from the snow, and a full hour later, they were still trying unsuccessfully to move the car.
• The postal service actually suspended mail delivery on Saturday, something that they haven’t done here in many years, apparently.
• And what’s snow without opportunities for fun? Yesterday saw the organization over Facebook of a huge snowball fight at Dupont Circle which had nearly a thousand people show up, and today the Secret Service relaxed security restrictions to allow people to sled down the slopes at Capitol Hill–probably the loosest that security at Capitol Hill has been since September 11th, according to the news.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that everything is still closed tomorrow. The federal and local governments are closed, the Smithsonian museums have all been closed (also an extremely rare occurrence, except on Christmas), pretty much all school districts are closed, and of course AU has made it clear that they will be closed tomorrow. Primarily because it would be unrealistic to expect the professors–most of whom live in suburban Maryland or Virginia–to try to get to campus; that can also go for a number of off-campus students as well, especially when Metro is still running at not even half-service.

Heck, there was actually an e-mail/Facebook uproar earlier this evening when DC Public Schools initially announced that school would be in session tomorrow, but starting 2 hours later than normal, resulting in parents complaining about the unsafe conditions for children getting to school, given the terrible state of many of the roads in DC. Not to mention how strange it would be for DC Public Schools to be open when essentially all other public/government services in the area are closed tomorrow. DCPS reversed its decision and formally closed all schools for tomorrow at about 8:30 this evening.

I did actually borrow a camera from ATV yesterday morning and went out and captured some video from around campus as the snow fell; you can see the raw, unedited video below. (Obviously the white balance isn’t great, nor is the exposure, nor is the steadiness of the camera–or lack thereof.) I’m just glad that I stayed upright the whole time, given that this was one of ATV’s brand-new $4000 cameras!

And yes, despite the wet snow, the camera survived without any problems whatsoever. No, I didn’t ask them for permission to do that beforehand.

So where do I stand–er, sit–now amidst all of this? Well, it’s certainly been a fun weekend. I got to be a part of history, and got probably the biggest induction into the experience of East Coast weather that one could ask for. And after the snow ended on Saturday, I got to have a Of course, having uninterrupted power, heat, and internet certainly helped out quite a bit to allow me to ride through this storm comfortably.

But the DC region isn’t out of the woods just yet. The area is going to be just as much closed down as it was during the snowstorm tomorrow, and it likely won’t be fully back up and running on Tuesday either. (I’d wager a 50-50 chance on whether or not AU will cancel Tuesday’s classes or not.) And then we’ve got the next snow storm coming between Tuesday and Wednesday which is still very much an unknown quantity. So far they’re saying that it will be nothing next to what we just went through, but it’ll be more than just a light dusting, and it might be enough to add insult to injury. So we’ll have to see.

But what I can say is that if there’s one allusion that kept running through my mind throughout this experience, it was one episode of Arthur, one of those kids cartoons that runs on PBS. This episode is from October 1999, and almost perfectly mirrors the type of environment that I’ve been witnessing here in DC. It’s a great watch to reflect on, so enjoy.

Part 1:

Part 2:

I’ll be sure to keep my Twitter updated as this event continues to unfold. Until then, I’ll keep the layers running, and do my best to make good use of whatever bonus free time Mother Nature sends my way.