突来暴雪 让华盛顿机场瘫痪

Tara Hamilton is the spokesperson for the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority and she is on the phone.

Because Tara, at this point, all of the D.C airports are not accepting planes and nothing’s taking off, correct?

That’s correct. I can speak for Dulles International and Reagan National. We have cancelled all flight operations until further notice, and you mentioned snowball fight, we are actually fighting the snow ourselves, but with trucks and plows. And we are, we've been, we are now in hour 24 of the snow here, and our crews have been working around the clock.

We are looking at the video of snow plows, big, heavy duty snow plows. I believe at Reagan, and they are plowing away and it just doesn’t look like they are getting anywhere. They are making some headway but you make a very good point that the snow continues to fall, it’s been, it’s a very wet heavy snow.

We’ve also had the additional challenge of very high winds overnight. So when we do clear, the snow is blown back. That's why we are literally starting to haul snow off the airfield.

Given all of these variables that you are dealing with, do you at this point have any idea at all about when things will get moving again?

I think we will have a better idea tomorrow afternoon once the snow has completely stopped. We’ll have all tonight and tomorrow, early during the day to get out there, and assess how much snow we have been able to move, and that’s literally what we’re doing. It’s about moving snow off the airfield as well as our roadways, to open up the facilities for flights.

I actually just have one really quick more question because we do have to move on. I’m curious, though, how many flights are we talking about here affected overall?

Between Dulles and National Airport a typical number would be about 1,400 flights a day. But Saturday is not as busy, so it would be more like about, maybe 1,000 flights today. But surely many people have been inconvenienced by this storm, and we will do our best to get the planes back to the airport, but we've got to get through this storm first.

OK, Tara Hamilton. Thank you very much and good luck.

Thank you.