Baltimore: None of those snow ploughs that Baltimore leaders keep talking about ever made it to the 1200 block of West 37th Street in Hampden, a middle-class row house community northwest of downtown.
So dozens of residents, tired of being marooned by the record blizzard for yet another day, took to the streets with shovels in hand on Tuesday and did what the city had not.
By Tuesday afternoon, they had cleared about half the block of snow, part of the long slog back in parts of cities like Baltimore, Washington and Philadelphia that has left many residents frustrated and angry.
“Can we bill the city if they don’t clear our street?” asked Heather Arthur, a 26-year-old manager of a J. Crew clothing store in the Washington suburb of Bethesda who could not get to work Monday or Tuesday because she was snowed in. “Are they going to pay us the $12 [Dh44] they give city workers to clean the streets, for doing their job for them?”
Casey Cole, a 48-year-old waitress at the Blue Moon Cafe in the Fells Point neighbourhood of Baltimore, said she had lost $700 because she could not make it off her street to get to work for three days.
“That’s a lot of money, and that’s money I can’t get back,” she said.
Though Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and other Baltimore officials said the city was clearing its 8,000km of road lanes as fast as possible, they could not say on Tuesday when most streets would be ploughed.
Transportation officials said fewer than half of the city’s neighbourhood streets had been cleared, compared with about 90 per cent of major thoroughfares.
“We have equipment ready, and we’re moving that equipment around to get to all of the neighbourhoods. This is a long, slow process,” the transportation director, William Johnson, said at a news conference Tuesday at Pimlico Race Course. The course was being used as a staging area for dump trucks full of snow, to be fed into a huge yellow snow-melting machine.
Baltimore workers have also begun dumping mountains of snow in M & T Bank Stadium, the home of the Baltimore Ravens.
Johnson said the city had received numerous emailed photographs of unploughed neighbourhood streets and phone calls inquiring about when snow-clearing equipment would arrive.
With the snow melting and then refreezing at night, though, ploughing some streets anytime soon will probably become more challenging.
Rawlings-Blake, a Democrat who took office February 4, 2010, the day before the start of another huge snowstorm, has repeatedly said in recent days that the city learnt a lot from that storm, called “Snowmageddon,” and has improved its snow removal effort considerably.
Throughout the city of about 620,000, however, residents’ patience was wearing thin.
Baltimore state school officials announced that schools will be closed Wednesday because many neighbourhoods surrounding schools remained buried, and the city said it will impose fines starting Wednesday: $50 for residents who do not clear sidewalks, and $100 for businesses that fail to do so.
The absence of cleared streets hampered emergency responses, as exemplified by a fire that burnt down a row house in the southeast Baltimore neighbourhood of Highlandtown and spread to two adjoining homes after a fire truck found a street impassable.
In Hampden, a city firefighter and paramedic, Paul Collins, 37, paused from shovelling the street and said some emergency medical workers had to walk as far as four blocks to reach patients because of unploughed neighbourhood streets.
Danny Scerbella, speaking over the din of shovels scraping asphalt as shovellers made their way down the block, said he was shocked by the absence of ploughing two and a half days after the last snowflakes fell.
“I’m from Milwaukee and just moved here in June, and I’ve never seen anything like this so long after the snow,” said Scerbella, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing who works with dementia patients.
“This snow would have been nothing in Milwaukee, and we would have been expected to be back at work by now.”
