Any Unknown or Unlisted Aircraft Manufacturer
Air Traffic Control Fully Certified
Air Traffic Control Time Certified In Pos 1 (yrs) 1
Workload; Training / Qualification; Situational Awareness
ATC Issue All Types; Deviation - Track / Heading All Types; Inflight Event / Encounter Weather / Turbulence
Air Traffic Control Separated Traffic; Air Traffic Control Provided Assistance
Human Factors; Weather
I was training at D54/23 combined. I noticed traffic building and mentioned possibly splitting out 23. Since myself and my trainee were on the D side; we decided at that point the best course of action was to work through it. A storm was forming to the west of SBY; and some PHL departures were beginning to deviate. We also had to feed 15MIT to the Casino sector with all PHL arrivals. About 10 minutes later we faced an onslaught of traffic; and although we shut the OOD and WHITE departures down; there were several in the air. On top of this we were working numerous pieces of unusual traffic due to the deviations. The situation got so complex that even though we tried to split out sector 23; we could not do it safely until about 15 minutes later. There were no protections in place to prevent this from happening. On top of all this; the KILMA cap was active; so we had extra traffic because of that. The entire situation that we were in; in my opinion; was unsafe and something should have been done sooner. Our FLM (Front Line Manager) did his best with the information we all had; however all actions taken were reactive because no one higher up did anything to help us out when we started reporting the weather deviations.Supposedly everyone has to watch the pre-duty weather briefing. When I watched it; the only area that they had flagged for storms was basically this area; and the area south. When there is a slight/moderate risk of severe storms; someone should have seen this and started moving traffic out of the area. I'm not saying shut it down; but lighten the volume a bit; then if the storms never materialize gradually ramp it back up. If this were a center-wide event; fine; but according to the briefing we received it was not; and the most affected area was going to be this one. There are numerous times that our area works extra traffic when other area are forecast to have bad weather; so it should have been the other way around this time. There's no reason why we should have a page and a half of flights in our URET (User Request Evaluation Tool) when every single one in the sector is deviating. That is unsafe and unacceptable.
ZDC Controller reported an unsafe situation relating to workload and weather.