Judging the District's Response to Rain
It may have been the shortest State of Emergency declaration the District has ever seen -- imposed on Tuesday night in response to two days of heavy rainfall, only to be quietly rescinded on Wednesday. But as the city dries off, residents are starting to wonder whether the declaration was needed at all. More importantly, concerns are being raised over what the response to heavy rain says about the city's ability to deal with a real emergency.
Ultimately, the city's ability to respond to emergencies may have been exposed on Constitution Avenue. As flooding knocked out power to street lights along the vital traffic artery (some 50,000 vehicles traverse it daily), overwhelmed police were forced to shut down portions of the road. The resulting traffic may go down in D.C. history books -- hours and hours spent bumper to bumper, often to go a few miles. Williams admitted that the response was bad at best, while Michelle Pourciau, director of the D.C. Department of Transportation, claimed that the generators necessary to restore power to key street lights were still on order. Reports the Examiner:
Michelle Pourciau, director of the D.C. Department of Transportation, said the traffic signal issue should be resolved later this summer when the city — using Homeland Security money — receives an order of 70 generators which can be connected to signal boxes during an outage. “By the next storm, we should have those,” she said.
The inability to move people in and out of the District somewhat efficiently is a key marker in how well the government is doing in protecting the city, its residents, and its visitors. In this, the District failed miserably. And worse yet, they failed miserably some five years after the 9/11 attacks, not to mention after spending the untold billions that have gone to "secure" the District. NBC 4's Tom Sherwood may have said it best when he wrote in his weekly political column the following:
Bad storms regularly attack Washington, but the disruption is always the same. [We] wonder why it is that billions of dollars going for "homeland security" might go for more routine but still disruptive natural disasters? In the heart of the city, tourists wandered around aimlessly, surprised that the Museum of American History and Natural History Museum were closed. A spokeswoman said they weren't flooded, just lost power. Why isn't the power grid more protected downtown? Isn't that a little bit of a security issue?Indeed it is. And this was the real emergency that resulted from the storm. Unfortunately, the city has again proven itself more adept at declaring emergencies than dealing with them. Next time the heavy rains come, we hope that changes.
Picture snapped by hey-helen