The District, with all its marble monuments and splendid architecture, seemed to go almost unseen at times on Saturday, its glories fading in the fog-bedecked distance amid the seemingly incessant onslaught of rain and mist.
The sky appeared relentlessly, featurelessly gray. From it, throughout the hours of daylight, came an almost constant cascade of drops and droplets that at some hours seemed dense enough to prevent many of the city’s more prominent features from being clearly seen. At 5 p.m., the National Weather Service reported that visibility here, normally 10 miles, had been cut to a mile and a half. Earlier it was reduced to three-quarters of a mile at Washington Dulles International Airport.By 6 p.m., Washington’s precipitation amounted to more than half an inch. Cars hissed through the water-slick streets. Passing through puddles in some places, they left splashes in their wake.