Adrian Bennett pulls a bike out of the snow Monday near Nashville, Ind. Many places in the Midwest are better prepared to handle snow than in places such as Washington, D.C., which was crippled by a heavy storm last week.

CHICAGO — The forecast: a mighty winter blizzard sure to dump a record-setting blanket of snow that will grow from inches to feet overnight, just in time for rush hour.

When it happened this month in Washington, they called it "Snowpocalypse," and an overwhelmed city couldn't keep its streets clear. When it happened last week in Chicago, they called it "Tuesday" and kept the blacktop black from first flakes to final drifts.

"I'd take my plow drivers and put them up against anyone in North America," said Bobby Richardson, Chicago's snow removal boss. "Ten inches, a foot of snow? That's nothing for us. Nothing."

That's not the case outside of Chicago and other cities in the American snow belt, where the strategy for cleaning the streets of winter's wrath is often based on a calculated risk that snow won't fall where snow usually doesn't. Most years, that gamble pays off. But this winter, historic blizzards have struck cities where traffic-snarling snowfalls are rare or even unheard of, exposing the dangers of counting on the "big one" not to hit.

"You won't see bare pavement for at least three weeks — and that's if we don't get another snow next week," Steve Shannon, an operations manager at the Virginia Department of Transportation, said late last week about suburban Washington's Fairfax County.

To be fair, the one-two punch of storms that socked the East Coast this month were record-setting, with snow falling so fast and deep Washington pulled its plows from the road. A quarter were knocked out of commission entirely by the struggle of trying to move so much snow off the streets.

And yet Richardson and his legendary snow-clearing legions argue keeping a city moving during such a blizzard isn't an insurmountable task. Should as much snow fall on Chicago as it did in Washington this month, more than 500 plows and 1,000 workers — hardened by years of work in tough Midwestern winters — are prepared to wipe it all away.

"Chicago would get through such a storm, and while it would not be total normalcy, the city would still function," said Matt Smith, a spokesman for the city's Department of Streets and Sanitation.

Buried by snow this month, cities across the Mid-Atlantic states were forced to scramble to locate plows, hiring hundreds from private contractors and seeking help from neighboring states. No place seemed more unprepared for the weather than the Washington area: The federal government shut down for days as District residents complained of a spotty, haphazard response that left some streets all but abandoned.

And in the South, where even a light dusting is enough to paralyze commuters until the weather warms up and melts away the problem, most major cities have only a handful of plows — if any at all. In Dallas, a city of 1.2 million people but not a single dedicated snow plow, authorities count on snowflakes melting the minute they touch the ground.

That didn't happen last week, when the worst storm in nearly five decades dropped more than a foot of snow in northern Texas. All the city could do was send reconnaissance teams to identify slick spots and direct trucks to spread sand.

So, which city is best at cleaning up after the Big One? Chicago, Buffalo, N.Y., or some other snowy locale? Those who study the business of providing such services say looking at comparable data is the only way to credibly assess whether one snow removal strategy beats another. But not only does such information not exist, the hundreds of variables involved complicate any effort to devise a master strategy.