1996

The Blizzard

Cars on Bachan Court looking back at our townhome on Sunder Court

Me in the Snow

In early January we had what became known as the Blizzard of 1996. It started snowing the morning of Saturday the 6th and by the time it stopped late that afternoon I measured 15 inches of snow on my back deck, and it seemed the worst was over and I was quite excited about it. I had never seen so much snow and had fun going out and walking around in it. I even enjoyed shoveling the snow off our short fifteen-foot driveway. But Sunday night it started again and by the time it stopped that afternoon I measured 29 inches. Big Meadows Lodge on the Skyline Parkway, just a couple hours away, recorded Virginia's greatest snowfall ever with an accumulation at 47 inches.  Come Monday morning they still hadn’t plowed our street, so I stayed home and was able to work online.  .  I didn’t enjoy a second time shoveling another 15 inches of snow off the driveway as much.

Julie and my Ford Explorer in our driveway

The streets of our neighborhood, Sunder Court that I lived on, and Bachan Court are private (owned by our neighborhood), so we had private snowplow service which on smaller snows, two, three, even six inches, they usually had our streets plowed by the time I went to work the next morning.  Not this time. After the first day of snow the main roads were so bad our snowplow service couldn’t even get to our streets.  After the second day of snow, it was even deeper.  Come Monday afternoon they finally got to the entrance of our neighborhood, but their snowplow didn’t get fifty feet before the snow built up on front of the plow so deep, they couldn’t push any further. They couldn’t push the snow to the side either with snow covered cars on one side of the road and our townhomes on the other.  They said they would have to come back with a front-end loader to scoop up the snow.

Snowplow a few townhomes from ours

I thought it was great! I could work from home, not that I did much work as few people could get to work and not everyone could work online. One of the neighbors invited everyone in the neighborhood to come over to their house for coffee, tea, and snacks.  It was nice to see the neighbors, talking to the ones I knew and getting acquainted with those I didn’t know.  Monday and Tuesday neighbors helped other neighbors shovel out their cars even though they couldn't go anywhere because the street was still covered with two feet of snow. It wasn’t until Wednesday that the snowplow company finally came back with a tractor and cleared our streets.

In DC, the Blizzard was known as "Great Furlough Storm," because it occurred just after the 1996 federal government shutdown and since the Federal government was closed due to the storm, it didn’t affect DC as much as it would otherwise have had.  

The snow didn’t stick around very long, because of unseasonably warm weather and a warm rain a week later, the snow quickly melted causing the worst winter flooding in decades for river and stream valleys in Virginia