The Channel 7 weather guy said the models are showing the worst of it hitting slightly south and east of DC. I live in St. Mary’s county, MD - south and east of DC. rah. It looks to me like it won’t start till later Friday (bearing in mind that’s still a long way out for a accurate forecast) and it should be over Saturday night. I get off work at 2:30 on Friday, so I’m hoping to miss the worst of it.
On the way home today, I stopped in Food Lion to get a rotisserie chicken for supper and a few other items. The store was crazy busy, but there was still food on the shelves, so I’m guessing the shoppers were all like me, doing an errand on the way home. Tomorrow, I have to stop for milk - I didn’t realize we were so low. But we’ve got plenty of TP, so there’s that.
One thing I do want to do - get some cash. We have a long driveway and my husband has a bad back. I’m hoping the guy with the plow who came around last year will come back. Since we buy everything on plastic, I rarely have more than a few dollars in my wallet, so I’ll hit the ATM in the next day or so. And if the plow guy doesn’t show, I’ll just take my time clearing the drive.
I can do without snow and I’m hoping we don’t get any.
I work from home though so it doesn’t matter.
I’m going grocery shopping even though I don’t really need to. I try to keep about 2 weeks worth of food in the house anyway, just in case. It may be a boring two weeks, but we won’t starve. I buy TP by the case, so that is never a worry.
My biggest decision is whether to move my truck out front or not. The street gets plowed, the alley doesn’t and can get pretty icy.
I worked at Safeway for 12 years. You have my sympathies.
I never understood the “snow rush.” Seriously, what do people think is going to happen? Every year people act like they’ve never seen snow before, and don’t remember how they DIDN’T get trapped inside their homes for days and days, even during the worst years.
Right. But your location suggests you’re ready for it. So am I. A foot or two storm is something you talk about around coffee after you get to work.
In an area where ‘All Season’ tires (if they have 'em) is considered enough, and the infrastructure is not there (or really needed) it can be a big deal.
Combine that with people that don’t regularly drive in the snow/ice it adds up to a big deal.
My Wife and I pick vehicles based on how well they can handle snow. Snow tires never come off. No point in it. The plow truck is chained up on all four tires and has a 10,000lb winch on the back. Our 4x4 Kubota loader gets more use in winter than summer.
That’s winter where I live. A bit much for people that might see a ‘storm’ every 4-5 years.
In all fairness the Mid Atlantic region of the US is one of the more heavily populated areas in the country, which does make bad weather extra irritating. Places that are more accustomed to snow in excess tend to have infrastructure built to accommodate. This region doesn’t.
I’ll be out in the heart of the storm, probably pulling a pair of 14 hour days Friday and Saturday providing video of the event for our viewers. I was hoping to avoid the snow this year but no dice.
It is hard for stores to be prepared for a snow rush. It’s not like at the holidays where we have a very good idea how much extra of most items we will need months in advance. The snow event rarely gives more than a few days notice, which is not enough time to get many more perishables in stock. So unlike the holidays, we run out of items quickly. Customers don’t always understand. The media does its best to hype the whole thing. Lines and crowds feed into the frenzy. As a human interest event it is quite interesting. Trying to manage it all is … difficult.
Then there is the staffing. Most associates do not want to get stuck at the grocery store once the flakes start falling. You can bet every parent of a young working person will not let their kids out driving in dangerous conditions just to bag groceries and retrieve carts. The staff shortage makes the lines even worse.
My goal is not to get stuck sleeping behind the customer service desk for several nights like I did back in 2010. I am too old for this.
When I lived near the Van Ness station, the frenzy at the Giant there would always crack me up. Nobody shopping there is likely to live more than a half mile at most from the store, mostly in large apartment buildings. I’ve never seen the store closed, and if it did close it wouldn’t stay closed for long. I can understand picking up a few snacks for a day in, but people load their cart like they are going to be roughing it for a week. What do they imagine is going to happen?
I am terribly sorry. This is all my fault. I am scheduled to have my Fios installed on Saturday morning. Apparently I have angered the Cox cable gods. They can’t put “snow” on my television so they have done the next best thing.
I grew up in the DC suburbs, and I’ve been back for the past 17 winters.
Regardless of how unready my compatriots are to drive in snow, and regardless of how bad the blizzard is, they’ve got almost all the roads plowed within 48 hours. This has been true for blizzards from the Washington’s Birthday blizzard of 1979 to Snowmageddon 2010. (With one possible exception: I wasn’t here for the blizzard of 1993.) So if you’ve got enough food and TP to last for three days, you can just relax and wait until after the storm to go to the store.
That isn’t how people react, though. They seem to think they’ll be snowed in for a week or two. It never happens, and it never comes close to happening.
The thing I fear most is a power outage (and with PEPCO as the service provider, I don’t think this is unreasonable). I live right across the street from a Target and a Giant, so I’m not particularly worried about running out of supplies–I went shopping today and didn’t buy any groceries that I wouldn’t have ordinarily, other than making sure I’m not running low on anything the cat might need.
But I did buy another blanket and a carbon monoxide detector because I’m afraid the power might go out and I might freeze or be asphyxiated by an idiot neighbor in my apartment building running a generator indoors.
The DC-area governments are famously ill-equipped for dealing with major snow, since it doesn’t happen that often. RTFirefly’s assessment is accurate for major roads, but optimistic in my view for side streets. Further, there is a significant transient element to the population here; many people have not experienced major snow in DC and literally do not know what to expect. If you’ve got kids at home who are going to start getting on your nerves if you run out of bread or fruit or whatever, it’s not entirely unreasonable to pick up a little extra rather than have to face a bumpy struggle down a rutted road or a slog down uncleared sidewalks on day 3.
For this current storm, models are predicting ranges of 12-21 inches, 18-25, or 20-30, with a start sometime between 10 am and 4 pm on Friday. Some parts of the region of the region will get sleet and wintry mix; some models show the rain-snow line cutting right through the District. There is a lot of uncertainty here.
Certainly, there is an element of over-reaction typical to DC storm onset. On the other hand, the attitudes some people in other places seem to have that winter weather everywhere must be like winter weather in their own city strikes me as a bit of a failure of empathy.
I guess it depends on where you are in the area, but IME, 48 hours has always been good for the side streets.
There are exceptions, I know: for instance, here in Calvert County, the narrow roads of Chesapeake Ranch Estates will keep the schools closed for a couple of days after the northern half of the county is cleared. But it takes a lot more people than those living in the relative handful of difficult-to-plow neighborhoods to cause the sorts of runs on the groceries we typically see.
But if you’re part of that transient element and haven’t been through one of our major storms before, how do you know to expect this?
I need to stop for mil on my way home today - am I insane? We won’t die without it, but I’m pretty sure if there’s none in the house, that’ll be what we get a hankerin’ for!
I just hope the worst of it holds off till I get home of Friday. Then I don’t care.
