Blizzard Clean Up, Power Line Update & More – January 2016 Dulles Direct Newsletter
By Matthew F. Letourneau
Dulles District Supervisor | Loudoun County Board of Supervisors
I know it has been a frustrating time, and issues remain on both primary and secondary roads. The County has been working closely with VDOT to help them identify those areas and devote resources to them. I’m very appreciative of the long hours and hard work that County employees staffing our Emergency Operations Center put in, as well as members of the Loudoun County Fire Rescue Department, the Sheriff’s Office, and the VDOT Loudoun Residency personnel. There were in some cases truly heroic efforts put forward to assist those in need during the storm.
There will be plenty of time for post mortems and lessons learned. I’ve received some questions about that and what can be done in the future to lessen the impact. The crux of the problem in this storm was the lack of available equipment and personnel. As I mentioned during my Facebook updates, “normal” snowplows that do the bulk of the work in a snowstorm simply couldn’t cut it with this much snow. As many of you saw firsthand, they got stuck, sometimes for hours, and ended up taking resources away from snow clearing efforts in order to free them.
A few people asked why VDOT didn’t have the proper equipment on hand from the get-go. The answer is that it doesn’t exist in this region. They don’t own it, and it’s not easy to acquire. VDOT did end up procuring heavy equipment from across the Mid Atlantic and New England, but given that this storm impacted the entire East Coast, they couldn’t get it ahead of time because those places weren’t sure if they needed it. Short of the General Assembly deciding to spend many millions of dollars to buy large quantities of heavy equipment, I’m not sure this is a solvable problem. Of course, there are always individual things that can be done better even with existing resources, and I’m sure we all will be looking at that. I will also point out that this wasn’t just a VDOT problem-roads in the area cities and towns that are responsible for their own plowing didn’t fare any better. And HOA’s had the same problem-their contractors didn’t have and couldn’t get enough of the right equipment either.
We are now easing back into things, with the County government reopening late in the week. Monday is no doubt going to be challenging because schools are back in session, and I anticipate regular openings for the federal government. Commutes will likely be worse than normal, and walking routes are probably going to be impacted. I’ve talked to the County liaisons about making sure that work is being done over the weekend around those schools, and the County has put its own equipment onto LCPS properties to help the system clear out parking lots. Please try to have continued patience-hopefully some warmer weather will help take care of some of these problems naturally.
Now onto other matters. In this newsletter I have updates on a number of items including Dominion’s power line project, Mooreview Parkway, and the FY2017 budget…