COLUMBUS, Ohio – Winter is wearing out its welcome in central Ohio, where the state’s largest school district was forced to cancel classes again and residents are complaining loudly about the delays in getting side streets plowed after this week’s snow storm.
Columbus City Schools decided to close for the third straight Friday, blaming snow-covered secondary streets that had yet to see a plow.
Other districts either delayed the start of classes or closed Friday because of bitterly cold temperatures and wind chills. The mercury dipped to -6 at Bolton Field on the Southwest Side, where the wind chill was -18. The temperature in Marysville was -10 and the wind chill made the air feel like it was -21.
There was plenty of criticism aimed at Columbus City Hall after the storm dumped more than 10 inches of snow Tuesday night and Wednesday. Buy Mayor Michael B. Coleman defended the city’s snow-removal efforts, telling The Columbus Dispatch that “I can’t make everything right for everybody.”
Coleman ordered 71 city trucks to turn their attention to the more than 2,700 miles of collector streets and residential streets Thursday night and Friday, according to Department of Public Services spokesman Rick Tilton.
The 87 vehicles plowing and treating streets as of 10:00 a.m. Friday consisted of 57 City of Columbus trucks and four city tractors, used in locations with narrow streets, like German Village because of their smaller size, 10 Franklin County trucks and vehicles from 12 private contractor, according to Public Service Department spokesman Rick Tilton.
Other schools around Ohio were closed or delayed as the digging out continues and folks in Columbus neighborhoods weren’t the only ones feeling cut off. A man who lives on the near west side of Cleveland said he was unable to leave his house for two days.
Tilton says the city’s plows and salt trucks are responsible for 227 square miles of roads and streets, far more than any other large Ohio city and more than many other cities in the country, including Boston, Washington, D.C., and Denver, Tilton said.
Tilton says those roads and streets are plowed in a systematic fashion: At the beginning of each shift, each driver is given a stack of maps and clears streets in one map area before returns to the maintenance yard to get a fresh set of maps and continue until the end of their shift. The drivers check off streets on their maps as they plow them.
Tilton says the city can be more efficient and effective because its fleet has been equipped with the GPS/AVL Warrior Watch system, which tracks their locations in real time and reports every 15 seconds. The system can tell supervisors whether a vehicle’s plow is up or down and whether it is laying down salt or not.
The system provides a record of streets that have been plowed and officials can verify whether a street has been plowed by checking the maps completed by the drivers.