The snow in Virginia continues. People who live in places like Chicago, Boston and Minneapolis see this yearly, and scoff at our confusion and school closings. But, to bastardize the phrasing of Scotty on Star Trek, Virginia is not built to take this kind of punishment.
It’s been falling seriously here since the week before Christmas. We had dustings before that, but when it turned into Calgary-type accumulations, it has not stopped. Last week all you could see was the top six inches of the roof of your car. 28 inches the week before Christmas. 34 inches since. 65 inches reported at Dulles Airport since late December. That is about three years worth of frosty pudding in the worst case scenario. Another 10 inches are expected today on top of a layer of black ice. All of that said, the snow is not the worse part of the weather – not by a shovel-full.
I-95 is a gauntlet of potholes. These are not irritating ripple-your-coffee potholes, but miles of VW Bug-sized gutting of the asphalt. These craters are like shrapnel wounds in the pavement. Did you see The Hurt Locker? I am talking IED-worthy holes that are violent at 65 mph.
Bridge seams are gouged into trenches by the expanding and contracting ice. Pocks big enough for a spelunker to explore are every fifty yards. Tires are being bursted, rims are getting bent, and headlines about Virginia not taking stimulus money to fix the highways are floating around newspapers. As I look out my window right now, it’s a whiteout, which means new and interesting crevasses to explore tomorrow on the way to work.
When you think about how advanced we are as humans, with all of our technology and science and achievements, just remember, the lowly pothole has us exactly where it wants us and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it.
