Wintry weather strikes again

Updated: 7:20 a.m.

A fresh round of snow is hampering the morning commute once again. VDOT reported degraded road conditions on I64 and a disabled vehicle on Afton Mountain that reduced traffic to one lane. The accident has now been cleared but potential delays remain.

Albemarle County government offices are planning on opening today at 10 a.m. Albemarle County schools are closed. United Airlines flights into and out of outage map is showing potentially a thousand households are currently without power.

Yet another wintry blow is striking Central Virginia, bringing several inches of snow and wind gusts of up to 45 mph.

In response, Charlottesville officials on Tuesday banned parking on downtown streets and opened the city’s two parking garages for free parking in an effort to clear roads of parked cars.

“You’re in for about 3 to 6 inches, but the bull’s eye of this storm is going to be eastern Pennsylvania up to New York City, where they’re expecting about a foot of snow,” said Andrew Ulrich, of AccuWeather.com. “What’s going to be tough up there is that the wind could gust between 40 and 50 miles an hour.”

Today’s snowfall is the latest in a series of storms that dropped more than 2 inches of rain and 2 feet of snow in two months. A storm last Friday and Saturday left more than 16 inches of snow on top of 3 inches from a Feb. 2 snowfall, which fell on top of 10 inches from a Jan. 30 storm, which fell only six days after 2.3 inches of rain flooded rivers, streams and streets, on top of Dec. 19’s 20.5 inches of snow.

Last weekend’s storm brought down trees and power lines. On Tuesday power companies still struggled to reconnect electricity to more than 2,000 local customers and road crews hustled to scrape clear at least one lane of every roadway.

“We’re racing the storm to get at least one path through the secondary roads so that we can focus on clearing the current snowfall,” said Lou Hatter, spokesman for the Virginia Department of Transportation. “It’s a challenge.”

Dominion Virginia Power and Central Virginia Electric Cooperative felt similar challenges as they worked to bring customers back on line before today’s predicted winds put them back in the dark. Both reported about 1,000 customers each without power Tuesday afternoon.

“Our plan is to get every one of the customers currently without power back on before the storm,” Dominion spokesman Dan Genest said Tuesday. “Unfortunately, there are going to be a few that we can’t get to because there are some areas that we can’t get our trucks into. When that happens, the crews have to go in on foot, carry their tools in, climb the poles and make the repairs. That takes a lot of time.”

The series of storms, combined with freezing nights, frequent chemical applications and scraping by motor graders and plow blades, is creating crater-like potholes in many roads.

“Considering the amount of snow we’ve had, we anticipate the streets will be in worse shape than usual when everything thaws,” said Laura Hildebrand, of the Charlottesville Public Works Department. “We’ll focus on repairing the surfaces as soon as we can. Right now, the crews that repair the roads are driving snow plows.”

VDOT feels the same pain, Hatter said.

“The conditions aren’t too good with the freeze-and-thaw cycle,” he said. “That’s going to create some rough roads, but it’s difficult to patch holes when the crews are dedicated to getting the roads open.”