Yesterday was a bad day to have your furnace go out. Sorry to state the obvious, but luckily for me, $180, some extra layers of clothes and some patience and it was up and running again in less than 2 hours. Bundle up – it’s cold out there. Madison schools are closed. I hope my car starts and my doors aren’t frozen shut. There, I think I covered all the small talk. Meanwhile, here’s the update from the streets department:
We received just under 1″ of snow yesterday afternoon and evening. Yesterdays midday rain and drizzle followed by the 1 hour or so of sleet and freezing rain iced up all of our streets since most of them were bare due to the Monday snow melt. That coupled with the rapid drop in temperature iced up our streets. We were able to salt a little during the afternoon yesterday but not enough to break the ice bond. The temperatures dropped so fast yesterday afternoon that we had to stop applying salt by around 6:00 pm and start applying sand at the hills, intersections and curves of our salt routes.
I expect todays commute to be better than last Tuesdays commute when we had the 8.8″ of snow with cold temperatures because we have been sanding our mains all night. Traction at the intersections should be better but still not great. We will be scheduling every available sander to keep sanding our main streets and to sand our residential streets throughout the day today.
It does not look good for salt use today as the temperatures are not supposed to get above 5 or 6. It doesn’t look like we will be able to use salt until sometime on Thursday when there is another chance of light snow but temperatures are supposed to rebound to around 20.
The blowing and drifting was not a major problem in the City but it definitely added to the icing of our roadways. The snow blowing over snow covered streets acted like sandpaper and polished some of our streets making them even more icy.
