COLUMBUS – What a difference a day makes.
State and local road crews had begun to catch up on snow removal efforts Thursday morning after struggling to keep roadways clear while flakes fell during Wednesday’s morning rush-hour, causing traffic problems and closing schools.
Residents were unhappy that snowplows had not reached their streets, forcing the Columbus City Schools and most other districts to cancel classes, since buses would have had a difficult time picking up students and those students would have found it difficult – even dangerous – to walk to school, according to school officials.
For city officials bearing the brunt of the criticism from angry motorists and parents, the timing of the storm made it difficult to send crews into residential neighborhoods because they were forced to repeatedly clear major roadways.
“So, you’ll often see us going over a [State Route] 315 or a [SR] 104 multiple, multiple times, so it can easily take us 12 hours after a storm ends just to get to the Priority Ones,” the city’s director of Public Service, Jennifer Gallagher, told WBNS 10-TV.
Follow the progress of Columbus snow removal efforts during any snow event
Ohio Department of Transportation and City of Columbus road crews had finished clearing interstates, and major highways, such State Routes 33, 104 and 315, and major arterial streets like High Street, Morse and Sawmill Roads and Sullivant Avenue, said Jeffrey Ortega, spokesman for the Department of Public Service.
Overnight Wednesday and Thursday morning, the crews were treating the 1,053 lane-miles of collector streets — Argyle Drive, Blenheim Road, Binns Boulevard, Buttles Avenue, Dunedin Road, for example — which direct residential traffic toward the larger roads — and had begun to treat the 1654 miles of residential streets, Ortega said
The city has an 87-vehicle frontline snow ice fleet that is responsible for clearing 6,387 lane miles of roadway, more than Cleveland and Cincinnati combined, Ortega said.
The state still had 100 ODOT plows on roadways Wednesday evening, mostly focusing on berms, shoulders, medians, entrance and exit ramps along interstates and state and U.S. highways.