Washington D.C. is a notoriously dumb city. It gets snow on a fairly regular basis, and yet it has absolutely no idea how to handle it. Even its supposed best drivers, the agents of the Secret Service, couldn’t drive in the light dusting the city received on Wednesday, and crashed multiple times. And now it’s supposed to get two feet dumped on it.
I’m not exaggerating, or using any form of hyperbole, when I say that the Beltway is full of shit snow drivers. With a grand total of one inch of snow on the ground, there were 70 disabled vehicles needing rescue in Northern Virginia alone.
President Obama’s motorcade, followed closely by reporters, got into three or four fender-benders in just the short trip from Andrews Air Force Base, in suburban Maryland, back to the White House, and the press pool report sounds like it was caught in the middle of an Alaskan tundra:
The vans slipped and skidded on the icy roads, making contact several times with the curb during the more suburban part of the drive. After nearly an hour, the motorcade vehicles started making more aggressive use of their sirens and stoplight privileges.
Poolers counted between three and four fender benders/accidents in the first 20 minutes of the ride, which ended at the White House at approximately 8:40 p.m.
It’s not like the motorcade was speeding, either, taking over an hour to get to its destination during a trip that should, in a normal car on a clear day, take about thirty minutes.
Drivers told local media about a complete lack of salt trucks and plows, as if that really mattered when you’ve just got one inch of snow.
“But Washington’s in the south!” its sycophantic, smarmy defenders say. “Those poor little drivers aren’t used to snow, they must be forgiven for this white clusterfuck.”
Bullshit. Even with 25 of the last 30 winters recording “below average snowfall,” the Washington area’s biggest airport, Dulles, recorded an average of 22 inches of snow. Everyone around D.C. is used to snow by now. They’ve seen it. They know it’s cold. They know it’s slippery.
A massive blizzard is bearing down on the D.C. area right now, and its citizens and city managers will cower into their garages, driven off of the roads by nothing but their own complete incompetence.
By tomorrow night, the city and its surrounding environs will be well and truly fucked.
Photo credit: AP
Contact the author at ballaban@jalopnik.com.
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