You know the unofficial motto, but apparently snow can and did keep some U.S. Postal Service workers from making their rounds last week in Bethesda.
USPS spokesperson Laura Dvorak said mail service to areas of Bethesda may have been suspended last Tuesday and last Wednesday and that more than 20 delivery vehicles got stuck in Bethesda. Some had to be towed.
Diana Huffman, a resident near Bradley Boulevard in the 20817 zip code, said some residents in her neighborhood got no mail at all last week. She got mail on one day.
She said the postal manager at the Westlake Post Office wasn’t much help.
“The manager claimed he had heard of no problem last week and that he had people go out at 8 a.m. to deliver mail that was not delivered yesterday,” Huffman wrote in an email. “Then he told me that one delivery person had been injured slipping on ice but most importantly, after the killing of the postal employee in Hyattsville, his people are told to come in as soon as it turns dark. He then told me he, ‘did not care about my problem.’”
“The Postal Service takes our customers’ concerns seriously,” Dvorak wrote in an email. “Statements that appear to counter this are certainly neither typical nor acceptable behavior for either managers or employees of USPS.”
Dvorak said USPS makes every effort to provide customers with mail delivery while keeping its employees safe. She also said that some Wednesday deliveries weren’t made because residents failed to clean steps or walkways.
“Carriers who felt unsafe did not make deliveries in those situations,” Dvorak said. “The weather reached 40 degrees on Monday with sunshine, which should have abated that situation.”
Last year, Chevy Chase Village filed a formal complaint with the USPS because of employee performance issues that were causing mail to be delivered at 10 p.m. and later.
Flickr photo by Nicole’
