City equipped for winter weather conditons

If June 2008 set the bar for flooding here, a winter like the icy, snow-pounded winter of 2007/2008 is the one that Craig Hanson gauges his winter preparations against.

Hanson - the city's public works maintenance manager and the closest thing the city of Cedar Rapids has to an action hero when it comes to fighting snow and ice - says the awful winter three years ago brought the city 200 percent of the snow, not to mention ice, of a typical Cedar Rapids winter. And he said Thursday that the city is equipped this winter to fight back just such a challenge.

“We're equally prepared or better prepared for (what is needed for) a 200-percent winter,” Hanson said.

The city, he said, has on hand 5,300 tons of salt and access to another 10,000 tons, if needed, which is significantly more salt for city streets than the city has had in five years. Three years ago, the city had on hand 3,600 tons of salt and scampered to come up with another 7,200 as the winter took a turn for the worse.

The price of salt, $68.02 per ton, is up 2 percent from a year ago, Hanson reported.

He said, too, that the city will create more brine from salt this winter to spray on bridges and streets than in the past as a way to delay the time in which ice adheres to the pavement. Thursday was the third day in the last nine that city crews already have used the brine treatment on bridges.

In addition, Hanson noted that some of what he calls the city's “plow force” is now equipped with “automatic vehicle location” devices so the plows can best be directed to where they need to be. The city has 13 road graders and another 80 plows on dump trucks, pickups and street flashers.

In Iowa City, John Sobaski, assistant streets superintendent, on Thursday said he, too, is ready for winter.

That preparation includes 3,500 tons of rock salt with a “chill-melt liquid enhancer,” 13 plow-ready vehicles and a 50-50 mix of sand and salt for colder temperatures and higher wind chills in what Sobaski called the city's “bunker.”

Hanson said he relies on an assortment of weather forecasts, from the National Weather Service to the Iowa Department of Transportation to local television stations, to make his own best analysis of how much snow or ice is coming and when.

Midafternoon Thursday, he was thinking the city was looking at 3 inches of snow between late Friday and early Saturday. As for the season, he said most analysts are predicting a normal to near normal winter, which Hanson said means 32 or 33 inches of snow for Cedar Rapids.

This winter season, the city has pile of sand in the back lot of its public works facility at the corner of Sixth Street and 15th Avenue SW that is available to the public free of charge. It is sand picked up by the city's streets sweepers and is suitable for winter use on driveways and sidewalks, but not for sandboxes. The city mixes the old sand with new sand to use on city streets.

Hanson also noted that the city has placed pink-tipped stakes on more than 200 flood-damaged properties purchased by the city outside the greenway area and the construction zone area, which are being set aside for the city's new flood-protection system. The stakes will quickly identify properties on which city crews now will have the responsibility to shovel snow.

More than 200 properties at 15 minutes a property means 50 hours of work per snowfall, Hanson calculated. It also means, he said, that he and his supervisors will likely be called on to do some of the sidewalk cleaning.

“I've got a shovel in the back of my city vehicle, if that's what it takes,” Hanson said.

The city, he noted, has posted signs in the greenway and construction zones to stay off sidewalks there, but the city will clean those after the rest of its snow work is complete, he said.