Road crews work ’round the clock

About a foot of snow buried Allen County Tuesday. Next up are frigid temperatures tonight forecast to dip near 10 below, with wind chill of twice that or more.
County crews spent all of Tuesday plowing roads and were back at it early today.
Iola crews were more persistent. They began to clear main thoroughfares at 6 a.m. Tuesday and never took an extended break. By daybreak this morning downtown streets had little more than a skiff of snow on them.
“We’ve had to go over most of the streets three or four times,” said Dan Leslie, Street and Alley Department supervisor.
He said main thoroughfares and streets near schools, the hospital and nursing homes were the city’s priority.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do about the residential streets,” Leslie said. “They’ll be hard to plow because of cars parked along them. I’ll find out today what City Hall wants to do with them.”
Winds of up to 40 miles an hour were forecast, but stayed at about half that velocity, Leslie said. That helped from making difficult circumstances even worse, he said.
“I don’t know what the county’s going to do with the drifts they’re going to have,” he added.
County crews started at 4 a.m. today in rural areas and were encountering drifts of 4 and 5 feet, said Bill King, director of Public Works.
Most people stayed indoors, honoring pleas to travel only if it were an absolute necessity.
“That helped us a lot,” said King.
The county today had six motor graders fitted with V-plows clearing about 900 miles of rock roads, and six trucks, with horizontal plows pushing snow off the county’s 100-plus miles of hard-surfaced roads. Two loaders joined the fray later in the morning.
The storm, which moved to the northeast overnight, was billed as one for the ages and may well have been.
A search of Register weather records turned up four 24-hour snow totals of 12 inches, twice in 1911 and twice again in 1912.
“This is the worst I’ve seen since the late 1970s and early 1980s,” when major snowfalls remained on the ground as long as six weeks, Leslie said.
The current snow is likely to be around for a while. Temperatures in the 40s are forecast for the weekend, but lows will dip to near 20 at night.