This past weekend, the Charlottesville area was a true winter wonderland. But six days after 2′ of powdery stuff blanketed the area, many roads remain a mess.
Roads in both localities (more of them in the county) remained unplowed or untouched by road crews for days. What accounts for the delay?
“Our crews salted all secondary streets prior to the storm and salted the primary streets just as the storm began,” says Chad Thorne, program coordinator for administration for the city’s Public Works department, in an e-mail.
“When accumulation reached 2" we started plowing our primary streets, at approximately 6pm. Plowing continued until the end of the storm, which was early Sunday morning.”
The city used 24 plows, eight backhoes, and added backhoes and front loaders to the plows.
“A motor grinder is an exceptional machine that cuts through the ice and gets down to the pavement. The caveat is that it’s a very slow process–the grinder travels approximately 2mph and one of them was out of service for more than a day. If all goes well, we will be able to send people home tonight for Christmas (but we’ll still have at least a dozen people on call should tomorrow’s storm bring any accumulation with it),” he writes.
With a storm that caused more than 3,000 power outages in Albemarle and about 800 in Charlottesville, the response by local road crews and VDOT, which is mainly responsible for clearing county roads, should have been quicker and more efficient, in order to ease people’s relocation to warm places supplied with power.
Thorne says that between Friday and today, city crews plowed the streets approximately four times (anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise, in places).
According to the Daily Progress, VDOT failed to plow some county roads due to oversight: Where residents did the work themselves, VDOT crews looked in and moved on. By the look of some comments on Twitter, many residents resorted to doing the work themselves, and wondering if crews would ever show up to help clear the roads.
Besides residents, area businesses are feeling the pinch on what’s meant to be the season’s biggest shopping days. Laura Vancamp, owner of Jean Theory on Fourth Street NE, says she was closed during the weekend, but re-opened on Monday.
Even then, she says, the street was not plowed. The trash was not picked up on Monday night. Staff at a neighboring store, Cville Smoke Shop, helped her clear the sidewalk. Even East Market Street remained unplowed on Monday morning.
“The most disappointing thing is that shopping Downtown is an event,” she says, and because of the storm, not many people have had the time to do some good old fashioned window-shopping. “Why was the Downtown Mall plowed and not East Market Street?” she asks.
On Sunday night, the county urged residents to stay put. In some cases, the National Guard had to respond. On Route 29 South cars continued to get stuck. By Monday morning, primary roads everywhere were still a mess.
Tuesday morning wasn’t much better. While city crews carved out paths on the Downtown Mall, the roads to get to pedestrian-only walkways were still in abysmal conditions.
Hannah Bessell, who works at Milano, says that the biggest challenge to getting people into the Downtown Mall coffee shop was parking. “We didn’t have any extra traffic,” she says, only walkers braving the ice. To encourage residents to do some last-minute holiday shopping, the city offered free parking starting on December 23 and will continue to do so in Downtown garages until December 27.
But with freezing rain predicted overnight, anxious residents have to wonder, based on last week’s performance, how ably road crews will respond to the next storm.
