Freshman Andrew Pazdon discusses the differences between how D.C. and New England react to winter weather:

Here are some fun facts to try out at the dinner table tonight. The District Department of Transportation stores roughly 39,000 tons of road salt to combat Mother Nature on D.C.’s 1,100 miles of roadway. Yet, my home city of Manchester, N.H., only stores about 3,000 tons of salt at a time for 560 miles of roadway. I’m not a mathematics major, but I don’t think those ratios are anywhere near equal. Thirty-nine thousand tons is a lot of anything, never mind salt. The District seems to need all that salt though because every time the mercury drops below freezing the standard response is to throw salt in nature’s face. I never thought to combat nature with so much pure salt. Instead, we like to go plowing in New Hampshire. In fact it’s a pastime.

Read the full column here.