I had been thinking about a road trip to clear my brain in the New Year- the trip back up from the Farm was delightful yesterday, and I like an open road with my Ray-Ban Wayfarers on and a grin on my face. Not today, though, and maybe not tomorrow, either.

The timing of this storm was absolutely perfect in tying the Imperial City into knots. What the weather-guessers were predicting was chill temperatures and a light dusting of powdery snow. Decision-time about cancelling daytime activities is around 0500 in the morning, and nothing significant had come from the sky, and most school districts decided to open as normal, or at most delay a couple hours.

Having made the decision, the various jurisdictions were reluctant to reverse themselves once some teachers and students began to appear, complaining that this was not only stupid, but dangerous. Arlington County Schools are open, even as the local Government is telling drivers to stay off the roads.

There are wrecks reported all over the region. The Beltway is snarled. Buses can’t make it up hills. I can see the headlights creeping along Route 50 in front of Big Pink. Traffic and Weather on The Eights is full time on both.

Please, citizens who live in regions accustomed to snow and ice, don’t point out that they do just fine in a foot of snow, just take pity on people who don’t even know how to drive in the rain. And I specifically mean all those people from Maryland. As of last week they were still struggling to understand what turn signals were, and why on earth anyone would use them.

That meant parents were out driving, and with the Holidays behind us, people were highly motivated to get back to work. Consequently, when the arctic air collided with the residual moisture from the Potomac and Chesapeake Bay we got the beginning of what the Public Safety folks are calling a perfect storm.

Perfect, that is, in that all the decisions were made on erroneous assumptions. Just like the Federal Government operates most of the time.

Not that this is anything like some of the storms of the past. My first tour in Washington came after ten years outside CONUS. I had been working at the Bureau of Personnel for a little more than a year. It had been a mild autumn, as things normally are here, and on the 10th of November temperatures were in the low 60s- unseasonably warm.

In order to navigate in from the wilds of Fairfax to the Navy Annex in Arlington and be able to secure a parking place, I normally left the house a little before 0500. That was not uncommon amongst the Flunky Class of Government Workers- we who were too junior to command reserved parking places inside the compound, and could arrive at a more civilized hour.

The rule of thumb was that for every five minutes later than that you could add ten or more to the commute, turning a twenty-minute drive without traffic into something stressful and parking a complete crap-shoot.

As I walked out of the house to the enormous Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale, I noticed there was a light but chilly rain falling. “Hmmm,” I thought, as I fired up the 350 cubic inch V-8 for the ride down, confident my gun-metal steel steed with the black vinyl top could master any road condition.

By the time I was at my desk on the ground floor of the 8th wing at the Annex, the light rain had transitioned to sleet and was accumulating in sheets on the ground. Compressed, it became instant ice, and by the time the storm turned to driving snow, the roads were swiftly becoming impassible.

I turned on the little AM/FM radio I had on my desk and listened with growing agitation to the reports on WAMU: “Thundersnow reported in Fredericksburg as the system intensifies and barrels up the I-95 corridor!”

By the time it reached the D.C. area it was too late to warn everyone.

Thousands of motorists were stuck on the Capitol Beltway and had to abandon their vehicles, hampering snow removal efforts.

Officially, the Veteran’s Day storm dropped 11.5 inches of snow at Reagan National Airport, though places around the region reported as much 15″ or more. Later, the forecasting community excused their failure to predict the storm due to lack of Doppler weather radar and were caught off-guard. Congress decided to invest in the new technology.

The Government did what it does best. Having failed to warn anyone or take preventive action, the Office of Personnel management set us all loose at once and shut down the government at 1000. We all emerged to attempt the un-cleared roads at once and try to head home.

I looked over at my boss, Captain Dru Simpson (rest his soul) and he was rising to get his bridge coat. He suggested that I leave the Olds buried outside and take his battered International Harvester back to Fairfax. “It’s got four-wheel drive,” he growled, and I agreed with alacrity and off we went.

There were all sorts of adventures on the way. We were parked at the bottom of a slight rise on Route 50, watching a vast Buick attempt to scale a slight rise. The sedan nearly made it several times before fish-tailing and sliding back down, perilously close to the Harvester’s bumper. Tenth time was the charm, and on the course of the journey we had to dismount frequently to push other cars. The snow continued to accumulate through the afternoon.

Eventually, we got to his house, 16 miles away, in less than nine hours. It was dark by then, and he loaned me the Harvester to make it back to King’s Park West in the little ranch home that was as much as a naval officer could afford in Fairfax County. Door to door, it was a little less than ten hours, a personal record for the commute. The kids enjoyed the day off, since the Elementary School was within walking distance.

This storm today isn’t going to be much more than a little inconvenience, and none at all for me. But I do pity those folks who slid off the road or into each other in the Mixing Bowl where I-95 collides with the Beltway. I guess the Governments were concerned about looking like wimps after their panicked reaction to the storms last year and all the lost school days.

But of course, the events of 1987 left a lasting memory in the bureaucracy, and we all know about how we over-react. Don’t we? In fact, I am considering skipping this winter altogether.

Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303