Several interconnected variables could be at play here, according to Breuer, and one could be an air-pressure difference. So I called Kenny Breuer, an engineering professor at Brown University, to see whether he could help me figure out the possible factors. But what I wasn’t warned about-and wish I had been-was the wind.Īfter a few months of being consistently caught off guard, I needed to understand what was happening. When I first moved here, I heard the tracks would be “constantly on fire” (they aren’t), construction would make weekend travel impossible (it doesn’t), and all the metro cars have weird, vintage rugs (which, okay, some do). Plenty of Washingtonians seem content to clutch their hats and ignore this puzzling phenomenon. It’s maddening, and no one can seem to figure out where the wind is coming from, or why it’s so variable. One morning I noticed I was tensing my entire body, bracing myself for a blast that-of course, this time-never came. But it’s impossible to predict when the winds will strike. Occasionally, a small child is knocked over. Every now and then, my fellow commuters and I will be caught holding down our clothes and gripping our reading material, while our hair slaps us in the face.
They’re not particularly bad when standing on the train platform, as one might expect in fact, it’s the level between the train platform and the street where the infuriatingly powerful gusts are the strongest. The intense and mysterious winds of the Washington, D.C., metro system seem to come out of nowhere.
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