Tip O’Neill uttered the immortal line “All politics is local.” I would corrupt Tip’s line thus: Nothing is more local than snow.
Take my street in Northwest D.C. It’s a short stretch between two well-traveled roads. One is a bus route along McKinley Street, the other takes carloads of kids to Lafayette Elementary School. My expectations that a plow might have cleared my street of the 2 feet of white stuff that fell last weekend were low. That was wise. I saw no sign of one.
“Never saw or heard a plow,” my daughter reported, and she was up most of then night with friends, because that’s how they roll at 23.
No surprise. With cars parked on both sides, our lane is barely wide enough for a snowblower. So we managed. Dads with dogs and kids with sleds started to describe a path on Sunday. By Monday a pickup truck or two had cut out grooves for wheels. Other cars fishtailed through. By Tuesday, the street was one lane of passable slush.
Fine so far, given the low expectations and the narrowness of the street and the depth of the dump. But how do Mayor Adrian Fenty and the vaunted D.C. street crews explain the mess that was downtown?
All snow being local, I took the measure of L Street between 24th and Connecticut. It’s a major, one-way thoroughfare heading east. Normally two lanes carry traffic across town. On Tuesday, L Street was down to one lane, just like my little uptown street. There was a 20-yard patch of hard ice and slush in the middle of the 20th Street block; same on the 19th Street run. Cars and trucks were either bouncing through the hard-packed lane or edging very slowly on the cleared lane.
Many downtown streets were in similar shape. True, K Street was cleared, as was 16th Street. But cross streets were down to one lane.
What happened to Fenty’s vaunted snow clearing system?
Short answer: aging equipment.
After the 18-inch snowfall in December, when Fenty first burnished his image as a commander in chief of the snow, the mayor held a CapStat session where he grilled Department of Public Works Director Bill Howland and Department of Transportation boss Gabe Klein. Neither had slept much for the three-day storm event. They reported that their crews had worked long and hard.
The problem, Howland said, was the fleet. The useful life of a big plow is eight years, he told Fenty, and 80 percent of the fleet is eight years or older. The Monday after that December storm, 20 percent of the snow removal fleet was in the shop. After last weekend’s majestic dump, more of the trucks are out of service. By the next snowstorm, scheduled to pile up more snow this week, nearly half the fleet could be out of commission.
Message to Fenty: Before you boast about clearing streets, check the garage for busted dump trucks — or start buying new ones.
E-mail Harry Jaffe at [email protected]
