Robert Poole climbs into the cab of his Sterling, single-axle dump truck. The view from the driver’s seat high above the road is commanding.
“This is what I drive,” he says, giving the steering wheel an affectionate thump. “And that is where I sleep,” he adds, pointing to the floor.
Poole, who is in his 23rd year with the Montgomery County Department of Transportation, isn’t kidding about sleeping on the floor.
“I have a blanket,” he says. “I just lie down. …It’s better than sleeping in a bunk room with 40 guys.”
Camping out in the 10-ton behemoth comes with the territory during the winter, along with working 16- to 20-hour days in snow emergencies and staying on the job until all 495 square miles are cleared. “I leave home, come to work, punch in,” says Poole, who is 57 years old. “It could be at the regular time, or it could be 3 o’clock in the morning. The truck’s fueled up, loaded up, checked out. We go to the starting point of our route. And we wait…
“Some days we’ll sit by the side of the road between two and eight hours,” he says. “We have to be ready. As soon as the storm hits, we hit the streets.”
Poole, who lives in Mt. Airy, heard all the griping about how the county handled last winter’s storms. He paid no attention to it. “I was too busy plowing.”
This winter’s arrival inevitably has triggered memories of last year’s extra helpings of snow: the December 2009 storm, with its 26.3 inches, wreaking havoc with holiday shopping; the double whammy of last February, with 32 inches, followed by an additional 7 to 20. The impassable roads and fallen trees, the power outages, the closed schools and government offices, the chaos and inconvenience.
Accompanying the memories are a few questions. Did it have to be so chaotic? Could the county—and the state—have done better at clearing the roads? And what about Pepco? The power company, hauled before the state Public Service Commission in mid-2010 for promising too little and delivering less, unveiled a multimillion-dollar plan in the fall to improve reliability. But will it be enough?
The answer is that the plowing went pretty well, under the circumstances.
“If we could just get people to understand…,” says Esther Bowring, a county spokeswoman. “It’s unbelievable, I think, what Montgomery County did.”
As a public affairs professional working closely with highway services, Bowring admits to bias, but she’s not the only one with good things to say about the county’s performance. “In the context of getting 3 to 6 feet of snow dumped on it, our county did a good job,” says Montgomery County Council member Roger Berliner (District 1). “I think it’s important to appreciate that last year was unprecedented. Extraordinary does not do justice to it. It was off the charts. So by definition we were in uncharted waters.”
Nancy Floreen agrees. “I think they did the best job they could under the circumstances,” says Floreen, an at-large member from Garrett Park (which handles its own plowing). “They did a pretty good job of overcoming tremendous obstacles and getting people back on the road as quickly as they could.”
Weather has a tendency to be variable, so the probability of a reprise of last winter’s snowfalls is low. The National Weather Service and meteorologists at AccuWeather, the State College, Pa.-based forecasting service, in fact, are predicting slightly less than average precipitation this winter (a half to one inch below normal).
“Last year was unique, for sure,” says Keith Compton, Montgomery County’s chief of highway services. “It’s one I was happy to experience. And it is an experience I’d like not to repeat.”
If the several hundred county employees and contractors deployed to plow the county’s roads last winter amounted to a small army, then Compton was the general. White-haired and compact, he has the bearing of someone accustomed to commanding troops, along with an encyclopedic knowledge of what he calls “winter road operations and pavement management science.”
And it is a science, requiring an understanding of the chemistry of pavement materials and behaviors, along with knowledge of physical phenomena such as the dew point (the temperature at which air becomes saturated and condensation occurs, a key factor in the formation of ice on roads). Not to mention forecasting skills like storm tracking.
Compton is standing in the Montgomery County Department of Transportation’s storm operations center, a long and narrow conference room on the fourth floor of DOT headquarters in Gaithersburg. A conference table dominates the room. Televisions screens, computers and monitoring equipment line the walls. “From this room, we gather intelligence,” Compton says. “And we make decisions about the Department of Transportation’s response to storm emergencies.”
(The DOT’s storm operations center shouldn’t be confused with the Emergency Operations Center, which is run by the county’s Office of Emergency Management and Homeland Security and which helped deal with the widespread power outages last winter. The EOC coordinates all players in an array of emergencies—police, fire and rescue, health and human services, Metro, schools, libraries and other government departments, as well as transportation.)
Last winter’s major storms approached the area in the early morning hours while Montgomery County residents slept, but the storm operations center was in full swing each time. Compton and others had followed the progress of the storms for days.
“They call my cell phone,” he says. “They call my house. They send alerts to my BlackBerry days before events occur. So no matter where I am—not that I would ever do this, but if I were vacationing in Florida in January and a storm were heading our way—I would know that and I would return home.”
It is when an alert is upgraded to a warning that things start to happen. “When we receive a warning, not only do we know it’s going to affect us,” Compton says, “we generally know the extent to which it’s going to affect us, the accumulation as well as wind speed and temperature.”
The county’s response depends in part on the path of the snowstorm. “Nor’easters are typically very wet snows. They carry a lot of moisture with them,” Compton says. “If it’s what is known as an Alberta Clipper, it’s a drier mix. It’s cold, it’s windy and it’s icy. A nor’easter will come through Silver Spring first because it’s traveling down the mid-Atlantic coast. Depending on what it’s carrying, it might dump a lot of snow on Silver Spring and have less of an impact on Damascus.
“Conversely, a clipper comes across the Great Lakes and makes its way across the Appalachian Mountains…it will reach Damascus first. …Knowing the nature and the extent of the storms, we’re able to move resources. …We don’t want to have 150 trucks sitting in the south when they’re needed in the north.”
