Despite numerous minor accidents, cars moving slowly through rain and some snow beginning to fall, last night's rush hour was lighter than the typical Friday evening crunch, likely because many commuters stayed home or left work early.
Calvert County authorities blame a rain-slicked roadway for the death of a 61-year-old Huntingtown man, who lost control of his 1977 Oldsmobile and crashed into a tree last night. Maude James Hall was pronounced dead at the scene of the accident on Ponds Wood Rood shortly after the 6 p.m. crash.
Traffic backs up in Loudoun County behind a car that didn't make it up a snowy hill. Given a hand by others, the driver decided to reverse course.
(Tracy A. Woodward -- The Washington Post)
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Another accident occurred about 10 a.m. when two vehicles collided head-on on winding Route 15 near the Oatlands historic plantation in Loudoun, where as much as 10 inches of snow fell. Both drivers and a passenger suffered non-life-threatening injuries, authorities said, and the road was closed for about an hour.
"When you're going that fast and you know it's icy out, that's just not smart," said Lt. Col. Ronald Gibson, a spokesman for the Loudoun County Sheriff's Department.
The two-faced storm was another example of the wobbly "rain/snow line" that is a familiar feature of Washington's winter weather. Yesterday, it cut a diagonal swath across the region, from Staunton, Va., up across Rappahannock County, into Loudoun, through the northern part of Montgomery County and then up across Baltimore County. To the northwest of the divide was ample snow; to the southeast, smatterings of slush.
The various temperatures in the air and on the ground were the culprit, said Watson, of the National Weather Service. Cold air coming down from the north tends to hug the eastern flank of the mountains to the west of Washington, she said. The District and its close-in suburbs are washed by relatively temperate air from above the warmth-retaining waters of the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay.
"At 2 in the morning [Friday], just when it was starting to snow good, National Airport was 33 degrees with an east wind coming off the Potomac," Watson said. "Dulles was 30 degrees with a more north-northeast wind."
That was the difference between rain and snow. And areas that are below freezing are not only more likely to have snow fall on them, they're more likely to have the snow stick around: As the snow settles on the ground, it cools the ground further, Watson said.
The snow caused the cancellation of some events -- admissions testing for Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology has been rescheduled for Dec. 13 -- but for a Manassas couple, the forecast was just the sign they'd been waiting for to get married.
It was snowing on the day a year ago when Joshua Perry and Midori Winegar met as he helped her pick up some Christmas presents she had dropped into a drift.
Looking for a ceremony that would be "unique and kind of different," the pair decided on a "winter wonderland wedding," Perry said. Two weeks ago, they mailed out wedding invitations that included everything but a date: They would exchange vows at the season's first snowfall -- whenever that turned out to be -- and would give guests 24-hour notice of the nuptials.
When Perry and Winegar saw the forecast for today, they hit the phone lines. At 11 this morning, they'll say "I do" in the back yard of the Manassas home Perry grew up in, under a bamboo altar that he made. Ideally, nature will be cooperating, with fluffy, picturesque flakes drifting down around them. "Just a nice, gentle snow," said Perry, "something out of a Robert Frost poem."
And if it's freezing rain being driven by a 30-mph wind? "I guess we'll just have to try to make the best of it," he said.
Staff writers Lyndsey Layton, Vikki Ortiz, Ian Shapira, Katherine Shaver, Nancy Trejos, Elizabeth Williamson and Clarence Williams contributed to this report.
