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I think the problem with these huge snowfalls in DC is that they don't have the equipment to deal with it. For them to get two 20" snow falls in the course of a week is a "100 year" event. I don't think they have the kinds of plowing equipment and staff that we have here in Detroit. Some jobs don't allow you to stay home (when I worked in the hospital, for example) so you have to get through it somehow, getting stuck often, etc. People don't know how to drive in it because they don't have that experience. Shoot, even here, when it was snowing to beat the band last night on my drive home, people were driving way too fast and spinning out all over the place. White knuckling it, watching others spinning out and trying to avoid them for two hours is stressful.
Two 20" snow falls in that short a time period would really hurt us, in even in the Detroit area. When we had 30" fall in 48 hours time in 1999, some streets in the city proper weren't plowed for two weeks. They didn't deliver mail in all that time.
You also have power, cable and phone outages at a time when it's really cold. Then pipes burst, etc. I don't know that their roofs are built to handle the weight of that kind of snow either! Their trees aren't used to it either so their branches don't hold up the same way that trees in the north do. It's a very unusual event for them. For the people in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, it's business as usual under those conditions!
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