I’m so sick of the snow I can hardly do another post about it. Apparently, according to Channel 3, out of the last 80 days, it has snowed 54 days or 68% of the days. We’ve gotten over 80 inches of snow this year and more is on the way. And yet, yesterday, we broke the record for the most RAIN on that date. It took me about a half hour to scrape the ice off my windows last night and get my frozen car door open. Only 32 more days until spring.
Yesterday Madison Metro canceled all service, streets flooded, the Presidential campaigns scrambled to reschedule their events, the County and City asked us to stay off the roads and Paul Soglin live-blogged the storm. Today, most of us try to go to work. Downtown it doesn’t look like we got three inches of snow, so many people didn’t move their cars, likely thinking that it wasn’t a snow emergency, but it was. So, I’m sure the “snow emergency” news and the plowing /narrowing of the streets downtown isn’t going to be good.
Here’s the latest from the snow weary Al Schumacher from the Streets Department:
I was wrong in my pessimistic outlook at the plowing times during the overnight. Because the majority of accumulation ended by 8:00 pm last night we were able to start our plowing of residential streets earlier than originally planned. As a result, almost all of our residential streets are plowed by now and we should be totally finished by 8:00 am or so.
We have started salting our main arterials again in the hopes of breaking some of the bond that the freezing rain, rain, snow and falling temperatures created.
We received over 1″ of freezing rain and rain yesterday which caused our side streets to become ice rinks. Kudos should be sent to Kathy Cryan from City Engineering for orchestrating the clogged storm inlets response that included crews from Engineering, Water Utility, Forestry and Streets. The snow on top of that certainly didn’t help. However, traffic should be able to travel with little difficulty this morning. We are hoping the salt works today and the afternoon rush will be better.
I expect you are going to hear complaints about snow and ice boulders in peoples driveways again. The wet, rain soaked snow rolled into boulders again as it was plowed to the curb much like what occurred back in early December. We certainly don’t do that on purpose but it is one of the side effects of plowing wet snow.
We did ticket and tow again last night in areas in and outside the SEZ.
This was the 13th full scale plowing operation of the season, (we normally perform 5 in a season).
This is the 6th plowing of 2008 and we have the rest of this winter and next November and December left.
Since Dec 1st, it has now snowed on 44 days of the 80 for 55% of the days.
We are over 83″ for the year. (previous seasonal record was 76.1″ in 1978-1979.On a positive note, the normal high for today is suupposed to be 32. We are inching closer toward spring.
I hope I don’t have to take up your time in the near future with another storm report or update.
Al
