Bob Foos
The effects of this half-foot snow are bad enough. Imagine what it would be like if the forecast of a up to whole foot had come to pass.
Webb City has been shut down for two days, and school has been called off for a third day.
In the midst of two 12-hour shifts, City Administrator Carl Francis said Wednesday afternoon that “we’re in pretty good shape – except for snow pack.”
“Salt won’t work when it’s this cold” as a method of reducing the snowpack, Francis said.
Public works’ main defense is a pretreatment that is sprayed on streets before it snows. Once the asphalt begins to show and is hit by the sun, “that’s when it (pretreatment) will work,” said Francis.
One good thing, he said, is that there have been no broken water mains to deal with, and he hasn’t heard of freezing pipes in residences.
The snow began to fall before dawn Tuesday and kept coming down until Tuesday night. Snowplow drivers were on the roads early and kept up with the snow on major streets and a majority of side streets throughout the day before going home at midnight. Crews were back at it at 4 a.m. Wednesday, took a break and were to return early Thursday.
“We’ve got to get people into work safely in the morning (Thursday),” Francis said.
City Hall was unusually closed Tuesday and Wednesday. Municipal Court was called off Wednesday afternoon. It will reopen Thursday.
Snow mounds are scattered where snow plowed from on-street parking spaces have been piled. They’ll likely have to be hauled off because it’s going to remain too cold for them to melt in a timely manner.
As Francis said, “This snow is going to be around for awhile.”
Webb City’s “official” recorder of weather, Paul Jackson, tells his Facebook friends that he’s let down by a snow storm that didn’t live up to the hype.
He shares a few snow scenes from a “disappointing” official snowfall of only 6 and half inches.
“I say disappointing as we were expecting around a foot or more of snow for the Joplin area. But we ended up with less because, as one of the local weathermen said, the air was just too dry.
“So I am still looking for a good old fashion snow of one to two feet like we used to have in this area, as anything less than a foot was just a ‘normal’ snow.”
The Webb City Sentinel isn’t a newspaper – but it used to be, serving Webb City, Missouri, in print from 1879-2020. This “newspaper” seeks to carry on that tradition as a nonprofit corporation.
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