Word: potomac
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Flurries of thick, wet snow swirled through the streets of Washington last Wednesday, clogging traffic and slowing down pedestrians to a labored trudge. As the snow piled up, Government offices and private businesses closed early and sent their workers home. By midafternoon, traffic on the bridges over the Potomac River that link the capital with its Virginia suburbs had already slowed to a crawl. Meanwhile, Washington National Airport had just reopened after having been shut down by the snowfall for two hours. At 3:59 p.m., Air Florida's Flight 90 to Tampa, a Boeing 737 with 74 passengers...
Divers plunged into the icy Potomac to retrieve the "black boxes"-the flight data and cockpit voice recorders-that were in the tail of the plane. The divers were also examining the wreckage to see how the rest of the plane, and the bodies trapped inside, should be recovered. Meanwhile, National Airport, which was closed again immediately after the crash, opened the next day. Every few minutes, a departing plane roared over the icy waters that held the wreckage of Flight 90. -By James Kelly. Reported by Maureen Dowd and Jerry Hannifin/Washington
...Meanwhile, the Secret Service has infuriated Virginians just across the Potomac River by ordering all five bridges linking the state and capital closed to private cars on Inauguration Day. They say it's necessary to minimize congestion in the capital, but not everyone agrees. "The Secret Service, they're insane," James Moran, a Virginian Democratic Congressman, told the Washington Post about the agency's decision. "This is security on steroids." He fought - and succeeded in reversing - a Secret Service decision to bar pedestrians from the 14th Street bridge, which would give walkers the closest access to the Inauguration. However, major...
...accident appears to have had a much better outcome than many similar incidents in U.S. aviation history. In January 1982, an Air Florida flight crashed into the Potomac in Washington. That plane was not fully de-iced on a 24°F day; only five people survived the accident, in part because it took a while for rescue vehicles to get to the plane in the cold water...
Read the 1982 TIME article about the Potomac River plane crash...