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Well, this is a fine mess we’re in—or, more accurately, Fern mess we’re in. (Who names a winter storm “Fern”?) Seven inches of “snow,” actually tiny and therefore densely packed crystals that have frozen into slabs of ice. Sub-freezing temperatures that will drop into low single digits every night this week and won’t break above 32 degrees for at least another week, which means all that ice isn’t going anywhere for quite a while.
And a tone-deaf city government whose main concern is that you follow its rules about clearing the “snowfall” from its relatively few sidewalks.
That was the general gist of the notice issued this morning, when the city announced that the snow removal clock had started ticking at 8 a.m., when the storm had “officially ended.” The by-the-numbers announcement that followed took pains to note that the total accumulation of 7 inches necessitates a 24-hour removal of white stuff from public sidewalks. It acknowledged that “this is heavy, frozen precipitation and the temperatures are dropping,” but rules are rules and safe pedestrian access must be ensured. “We want to solve this through community cooperation, not citations,” city manager Leslie Beauregard assured everyone, displaying just a hint of steel.
Meanwhile, my street remains untouched by a snowplow, and undoubtedly it is not unique. No telling how many shopkeepers or other business owners there are in Staunton whose commercial properties are some distance from their similarly blockaded homes, but somehow they’ll have to navigate from point A to point B to clear the way for all those pedestrians just waiting to use their sidewalks. Either that or face possible citations, although good news: as today’s announcement took pains to explain, citations are “a civil penalty rather than a criminal misdemeanor.” Whew!
All that sternness is in marked contrast to Friday’s notice that the city manager had declared a local emergency ahead of the storm. Just what the declaration meant for the average Staunton resident wasn’t exactly clear, beyond encouragement to stay off the streets, but it did note that it activated the city’s official-sounding but entirely inscrutable Emergency Operations Plan: no link to that plan was provided in the announcement, and good luck trying to find it on the Staunton website. Apparently it does endow the city with superpowers, however, as it “removes any barriers to our response efforts and allows us to mobilize additional resources, if necessary,” according to Beauregard.
Nothing in the state of emergency suggested that anyone would be giving the public any slack, but that didn’t dissuade the city from asking residents to be gentle. “Please be patient,” the emergency declaration beseeched. “Clearing substantial snow accumulations across the city will require more time than usual.”
Indeed it will, and all the more so when the “snow” is more like ice and the temperature here is barely above that in Anchorage (21 degrees) at this writing. But that patience, it should go without saying, should run both ways. It would have shown some understanding of the Fern mess we’re in if—instead of bolting out of the gate with a finger-wagging admonition about its residents’ responsibilities—the city had used its newly declared power to “determine the use of materials, goods, services, and resource systems” to let the public know what help it might expect.
Looking askance 