Increased spending on public health preparedness and drilling for potential disaster response scenarios could help states like Virginia handle the next “unprecedented” storm or other calamity, according one expert.
"In public health, we don't often think about the interstate as something other than a place where maybe there's accidents and injuries that happen," said Megan Latshaw, associate scientist in Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "We do talk in public health about what we call all hazards preparedness. So that means, we're ready for anything.
State officials described the storm that swept through Northern Virginia on Monday as "unprecedented." It dropped about 10 inches of snow in some areas and temperatures plunged into the teens. During a conference call with reporters Tuesday afternoon, Transportation Commissioner Stephen Birch said that a cycle of rain before snow had thwarted preemptive efforts like pretreating the roads, due to concerns the rain would just wash the ice melt away.
Vehicles are stuck in gridlock in the morning on the Interstate Highway I-95 near Stafford, Virginia, U.S., Jan. 4, 2022 in this still image obtained from a social media video. "It's a little mind-boggling, if you think about there was no access to water, there was no access to food," Latshaw said. "There was no heat. There was no sanitation like places to relieve yourself or even wash your hands. There was no access to health care. It sounds like you're not in the United States."
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