In Chicago, snow removal down to a science

That’s not the case outside of Chicago and other cities in the American snow belt, where the strategy for cleaning the streets of winter’s wrath is often based on a calculated risk that snow won’t fall where it usually doesn’t. Most years, that gamble pays off. But this winter, historic blizzards have struck cities where traffic-snarling snowfalls are rare or even unheard of, exposing the dangers of counting on the Big One not to hit.

“You won’t see bare pavement for at least three weeks - and that’s if we don’t get another snow next week,’’ Steve Shannon, an operations manager at the Virginia Department of Transportation, said late last week about suburban Washington’s Fairfax County.

To be fair, the one-two punch of storms that socked the East Coast this month was record-setting, with snow falling so fast and deep that Washington pulled its plows from the road. A quarter were knocked out of commission entirely by the struggle of trying to move so much snow off the streets.

And yet Richardson and his legendary snow-clearing legions say keeping a city moving during such a blizzard is not an insurmountable task. Should as much snow fall on Chicago as it did in Washington this month, the city’s more than 500 plows and 1,000 workers - hardened by years of work in tough Midwestern winters - are prepared to wipe it all away.

Buried by snow this month, cities across the Mid-Atlantic were forced to scramble to locate plows, hiring hundreds from private contractors and seeking help from neighboring states. No place seemed more unprepared for the weather than the Washington area: The federal government shut down for days as District residents complained of a spotty, haphazard response that left some streets all but abandoned.

And in the South, where even a light dusting is enough to paralyze commuters until the weather warms up and melts away the problem, most major cities have only a handful of plows - if any at all.

In Dallas, a city of 1.2 million people but not a single dedicated snow plow, authorities count on snowflakes melting the minute they touch the ground.

That did not happen last week, when the worst storm in nearly five decades dropped more than a foot of snow in northern Texas. All the city could do was send reconnaissance teams to identify slick spots and direct trucks to spread sand.

After a brief respite over the weekend, it was snowing again in Washington yesterday.

Snow and ice also pelted parts of Alabama, Kentucky, and Tennessee for the second time in a matter of days, and travel conditions were poor.

With an annual average snowfall of 38 inches, Chicago maintains a fleet of 300 trucks that are specifically designed for removing snow and budgeted $17 million for the work this winter.

Washington, with an average of 19.4 inches of snow each year, has 200 trucks that can be fitted with plow blades and a snow budget of $6 million.