From preparation to completion, city crews clean up after winter storms

SNOW

Weather forecasters predicted anywhere from eight to fifteen inches of snow and ice across Kansas, including the Concordia area. Getting that much snow off your sidewalk and out of your driveway requires a lot of effort with a shovel.
But what about the people whose job it is to move massive amounts of snow off our streets?
The Blade visited with Ron Copple, Concordia's Public Works Director, and Jim Metro, the city's Street Department Supervisor, to see what their departments deal with after a major winter storm hits.
"We're always checking the weather," Copple said, "and by Friday (January 22) it was obvious that we were going to get hit pretty hard on Sunday or Monday."
Copple met with Metro and began to plan things out. "We had everything ready by Friday," Metro said.
City street crews put chains on the tires of their dump trunks and mounted snow plows on the front end. For added weight and traction, a cement block weighing 3,500 pounds is placed in the back of each truck.
The perfect winter storm - meaning the worst possible storm for the city crews - rolled in early Monday morning. Ice first, and then snow on top of the ice.
"I was up at 3:30 in the morning watching the weather," Copple said. "We got the salt truck out first, working the priority routes."
City policy is to clear the priority streets first - the highways and emergency snow routes that must remain open for certain facilities in an emergency. "We then salt at stops signs, and all the streets with steep hills."
Copple noted that the morning hours are the worst time for ice. "There's usually a high level of traffic in the morning, and that's bad for us. Aside from slick road conditions, vehicles pack the ice down even harder on to the street, making it difficult to remove when it comes time to plow."
The city's plows are gravity-down, not hydraulic. This means they use the weight of the plow itself to get under the snow and ice. If the ice is packed down, it's hard for a plow blade to get beneath it.
The city usually stores up to 200 tons of salt. Copple said that on Monday, he used about 100 tons.
Concordia buys its salt from a company in Kanopolis, and contracts with Abram Ready Mix to haul the salt to Concordia.
"If I place an order in advance, I can usually get it here in about two days. When the whole state gets hit like we just did, it can take a week to ten days to fill an order."
After about an inch of sleet and freezing rain fell, it started to snow. Hard.
"That's what makes it worse," Copple said. "Now we're going to have snow on top of the ice."
City policy says the crew will begin removing snow once there is at least three inches on the ground.
"We wait for it to stop snowing before we go out," Copple said. "If we go out and scrape the first three or four inches, with a storm like this, by the end of the day there's another six or seven inches on the ground. We'd have to start all over again."
City crews began plowing snow at about 1 p.m. on Monday. They finished at 11 p.m. and removed the snow plows from the trucks and got ready to pick up piles of snow and move it.
Then it snowed another three inches overnight.
"We didn't expect another three inches," Metro said. "We had to mount the plows again and go out and plow."
"We had crews in at 5 a.m. to get started," Copple said.
When the city plows a street, it starts in the center of the street and blades the snow out to the curb. Often times two plows will work in tandem. Copple wanted to point out that, despite what some people think, they do not blade all the snow to one side of the street.
Meanwhile, residents are digging out at their homes. We've all shoveled the sidewalks, and either shoveled or snowplowed driveways. Copple wanted to remind residents that a city ordinance prohibits people from throwing snow back into the street after it has been plowed.
"Ordinance 18-115-B prohibits people from pushing or blowing snow back into the street. It really is a safety measure. That snow can freeze over and create large mounds that damage vehicles when they drive over it. So if you're blading out a driveway, don't push the snow back into the street."
Once the streets are plowed, the crews begin the laborious process of removing the snow.
We've all seen those piles of snow in the middle of the street. The only good thing about them is that scofflaws can't make illegal J-turns.
On Thursday morning at 1 a.m., crews began removing the piles of snow from the downtown area. They take the snow to the city yard at 519 Mill Street, where there's a large area to dump the snow.
One cubic yard measures 3feetx3feetx3feet. Copple estimates that with this last storm, his crews removed an estimated 1000 cubic yards of snow.
Here's an interesting item: the city crews also plow the runway at Blosser Municipal Airport-CNK, the areas around the hangars, and the parking lot and camping stalls at Blosser Park.
"Blading the runway takes about half a day," Copple said. "The runway is 3600 feet long and 60 feet wide - plus the aprons - so that's a big job."
While the streets are being plowed, another crew clears the sidewalks at all the city buildings, like the police station and city hall. Once those sidewalks are clear, they move on to the sidewalks in the parks, the walking trail, and along the highways and College Drive.
All total, Concordia received about eleven inches of snow. How did this storm rank on a scale of 1-to-10, with 10 being the worst?
"It wasn't bad," Metro said. "About a three or four. We didn't have any breakdowns, and nobody got stuck."