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The Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang has created a scale to rate the winter storms that always seem to snarl travel and impact schools and businesses in the region. Rather than gauging a storm by the number of inches of snow, the Weather Gang scale rates the storm’s impact.
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Just as one storm passed last weekend, here in D.C. (as well as across central and eastern parts of the country) we’re expected to get more winter weather. As USA Today reported, a pair of winter storms will dump snow and ice across the central and eastern U.S. over the next several days, with the second storm a potential blockbuster in some spots, with a foot of snow possible. However, with snow comes road salt to help it melt and prevent ice from forming. The downside of melting snow with rock salt is that when the snow melts most of that salt makes its way into waterways where it can harm aquatic species should enough of it accumulate. As CNN explained, salt can also change the way the water mixes and lead to the formation of salty pockets near the bottom of lakes, creating biological dead zones.
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