National Airport is in Arlington, directly on the Potomac and inside the original District land cession. It is about as urban as a major commercial airport can be.
Urban to the point that that there are no departures between 11:01 PM & 5:29 AM and no arrivals between midnight & 6:59 AM lest the rich folk in Crystal City highrises complain more than they already do.
Maybe, but it is not in DC proper so not our fault. It was someone in the Commonwealth of Virginia’s fault; the previous governor of which is going to jail for corruption, it’s things like that why I can’t support voting rights for Virginians.
Please, it’s bad enough for us Northern Virginians that we have to try to balance out the rest of the state. Don’t disenfranchise us too or the rest of the Virginians will take over and we’ll turn into Far North Carolina or worst, East Virginia.
Was Waffle House open? If so, things weren’t that bad.
It’s in Arlington County, which doesn’t even qualify as a town, much less a city.
Every time I cross the river, I am pretty sure I’m going to be accosted by rubes who are unaccustomed to my big city ways.
And let’s face it: if DC is a second or third rate Manhattan, Arlington is a second or third rate Staten Island.
Nobody had a yardstick?
I’ll say right up front, I don’t know anything about the eastern part of our country, particularly how much snow you all might get. So this might be a dumb question - don’t you all get a bunch of snow every winter? Not this much usually, but enough that it shouldn’t be a total surprise when it happens?
I was living in WA and working in Seattle when they got a record snowfall there, something like four inches, and the whole city just dropped dead. My employer even paid for us to stay in town because they knew that if we got out, we probably wouldn’t be able to get back in the next morning. BUT, this is a city that rarely even gets snow, much less snow that sticks, much less four whole inches. Snowplows had to come from Snoqualmie Pass, 90 miles away, and snowplows don’t go awful fast. So it made all kinds of sense that Seattle was immobilized for awhile. But in a place that gets snow every year? What’s up?
Stop going to far north Arlington. Anywhere else, particularly around a Metro station at night, you should be more afraid of getting mugged. Especially if that Metro station is Crystal City. Tourists and rich residents make for good targets.
In the DC/Baltimore metroplex, this was the equivalent of an entire season’s worth of snow in 36 hours.
Are we talking about a different North Arlington. Most of North Arlington is pretty safe. Hell, I’d say the same about South Arlington.
I live in Fairfax County, and we got the first plow by Saturday morning. They kept coming back although they didn’t get all of the snow, but once I dug out my driveway and shoveled my sidewalk on Sunday, we were out and about. I got mail on Tuesday as well.
It sounds like the bigger problem was your condo board and the contractors they hired.
That’s why I always tell visitors that if they are walking back to the Marriott Crystal Gateway at 1 am and they hear banjos, they should run.
Just a whooshing contest. 
Although when we moved to this neighborhood 16 years ago, we wouldn’t go out at night. Never knew when the local gangs would have a turf war. The situation improved greatly with the new community center and increased police presence.
You’re well ahead of the curve as long as no one on you block shoots into the air and yells,
“Dammit! Ah emptied Three Whole Clips inta that cloud and it Still Snowed!!! Gather the girls… its The End of Daaaaays!!!”
Yep.
Since I had my laptop and a good VPN connection, I worked on Friday, Monday, and Tuesday from home even if the gov’t was officially closed. Given the traffic and the big piles of snow still on the sides of the roads Wednesday and today, I would’ve been glad to continue working from home the whole week.
I once counted 18 accidents in the traffic report, largely shutting down the region, because it rained. Our drivers are capable of almost any feat of incompetence.
Not when the City of Philadelphia finished their plowing operations before a HOA with less than 2 miles of streets. When the snow stopped Sat night, there’s not much difference between bringing in equipment Wed night & Thurs morning, but at least if they did the latter the streets would have been cleared because they wouldn’t have been clogged up with parked cars during the day when everyone left for work.
This was our 4th largest storm ever! We have lots of equipment, but it was just overwhelmed. Pickups can’t push 2’ of snow so they have to bring in front end loaders & bobcats. Not only do these work much slower as they can only grab a scoopful at at time but they pretty quickly overwhelm the corner with 10-15’ high piles & then need to drive even further to dump it or drop it into the back of a large dump truck.
For work I was out driving in the DC region throughout the storm and all this week. Spiderman is correct - snow removal is insanely slow when there is no place to put it.
DC was designed 200 years ago before cars. It’s tight and hard to drive through on the best of days. Due to the growth it has been experiencing there aren’t any vacant lots in most of the city to conveniently dump the snow. Lines of contractors dump trucks were brought in to clean even minor side streets at great expense.
Sadly there is an excess of people whining about not being served quickly by (insert entity here). The region does not have the equipment to quickly clean up a storm of this magnitude, and nobody wants to pay to have that equipment sitting around for the occasional times it’s needed. Maryland shipped it’s heavy highway blowers in from the mountains to clear the interstates. Contractors are usually lawn care guys who don’t have the gear to do huge snowfalls.
I guess I would be upset if authorities promised everything would be great by Tuesday but they didn’t. I imagine folks got upset when they see others out and about and they feel “What about me?” Unfortunately there is no way everyone gets cleared at the same time.
You really can only help yourself. Own a good vehicle, dig yourself out, or in the case of this neighborhood, band together and do the job yourself.
Besides what’s already been mentioned, we also have a commuting situation that is difficult even in the best of times. DC has some of the highest housing costs in the nation, and even middle-class people often commute from far-flung suburbs. It’s not unusual at all in my office for people to have a commute of an hour or more. The roads are clogged and parking is outlandishly expensive, so many people commute by rail, a network of city and commuter busses, bicycle or even hitchhiking. The aging metro system is plagued by delays and breakdowns even in good weather, and it runs particularly poorly in the cold. So when a weather event like this happens, the already strained transit system becomes completely non-functional.
I think the Halloween Blizzard was around 28 inches, wasn’t it? And didn’t the stadium roof collapse after about half that much?