Region bracing for blast of winter
Posted on Saturday, February 18, 2006
LOWELL - Springdale Public Works director Sam Goade checked radar and saw nothing but clouds over southeast Arkansas at 10 a.m. Friday morning.
"What the radar shows me now I can't take any comfort in,"he said. "Late tonight and early tomorrow is when we'll start getting snow cover."
The National Weather Service office in Tulsa issued a winter weather advisory through noon today for Northwest Arkansas.
The forecast called for about 3 inches of snow and sleet and one-quarter inch of ice mixed with freezing rain starting Friday night and continuing through Sunday.
Temperatures throughout the weekend were not expected to climb above 25 degrees.
State, county and city road crews were planning Friday to pretreat bridges before the worst hit strikes. They will try to deal with any overnight accumulation of ice beginning this morning, concentrating first on the most heavily traveled highways and streets.
"We're ready,"said Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department spokesman Randy Ort. "Unfortunately it looks like this will not affect just a portion of the state - it will affect the entire state."
Luckily, Ort said, the ice is coming on a weekend, rather than a workday when more motorists would be out.
Still, the Arkansas State Police likely will staff a "critical incident command center"so that highlevel staffers can help coordinate rescue efforts of any stranded motorists, said agency spokesman Bill Sadler. State Police Col. Steve Dozier was expected to make that decision Friday night but had not done so by presstime.
The Arkansas National Guard also is on standby in case it is needed to help with rescue efforts, according to the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management.
The possibility of a weekend storm had city street departments in Northwest Arkansas assembling employees, preparing equipment and pre-treating roads Friday.
Rogers street superintendent Frankie Guyll put roughly 20 employees on call for the weekend. The city has four trucks and snow plows loaded with salt and gravel and magnesium chloride ready to use on priority streets. The potential for ice had him worried Friday, as he recalled the chaos a large ice storm in December 2000 caused statewide.
"You just can't deal with the ice,"he said. "You can't scrape it off because it's frozen so hard. With snow, we can use graders to knock it off the road, but you can't deal with ice."
Perry Franklin, Fayetteville's transportation superintendent, put his employees on eight-hour shifts for the weekend. On Friday, they mixed rock salt and water to create a brine that pretreats roads. It was spread from 300-gallon vats attached to trucks in hopes of delaying water freezing on roads.
"This cuts way down on packed snow and ice,"Franklin said. "It's similar to your ice cream freezer."
Once the snow and ice fall, Franklin's 15-person shifts will spread a salt mixture near Washington Regional Medical Center and along Joyce Boulevard, College Avenue and Township Street before branching into neighborhoods.
"The first place people should watch out for are the overpasses,"Franklin said. "The wind will chill that concrete and steel real fast."
Overpasses were pretreated with calcium chloride because it makes the bridges less slick, said Chad Adams, the district four maintenance engineer for state Highway and Transportation Department. The district, based in Fort Smith, covers a seven-county area, including Washington County.
After the snow falls, employees on shifts spread pellets of calcium chloride along with salt and sand to speed melting and help with slippery streets, he said.
"If you get heavy rain before the snow and ice starts, it will reduce the effectiveness,"he said. "It's a waiting game once we get our equipment ready."
Tina Sinclair, a Highway Department employee, left work at 4 p.m. Friday, with plans to go home and nap before coming back overnight for a shift in a plow truck.
She expects to hit Interstate 540 and U. S. 412 before U. S. 71 B.
Some Northwest Arkansas residents, meanwhile, spent part of Friday picking up the necessities for staying at home, while others waited for the first flakes.
Don Harris, manager of the Harps store in Bentonville, said his customers usually don't rush the store "until the first snowflakes start falling from the sky."But by midday, customers at Fayetteville's Ozark Natural Foods were packing the store.
"Oh my gosh, it's been crazy here all day,"cashier Patria Ostrom said, juggling the phone with one hand and checking out customers with the other. "People have been stocking up on food, water, vitamins. Even if you live off tofu, you're going to need extra tofu if the snow traps you indoors for a weekend."
Customers raced to the Arkansas border and flooded Macadoodles Market Deli in Pineville, Mo. They were drawn by the dream of winning the $ 365 million lottery jackpot. "Usually, the big rush comes the day of the drawing, but I've been at this machine for hours today punching out tickets,"Macadoodles' owner Roger Gildehaus said. "People are afraid they'll be snowed in tomorrow."
The roads will be cold enough for snow or ice to stick and the only vehicles on the road should be city trucks, Franklin said.
"It's going to be cold and miserable, so get a good book and curl up,"he said. "Stay inside, and don't drive."
Sinclair has plowed snow on state roads for nine years and feels safer in the truck than in her own car. Her husband, Dennis, plows the streets in Springdale.
"He takes care of the city, and I take care of the state roads,"she said. "Then we come home, say, 'Hi,' and'Goodnight. '"Information for this article was contributed by Lynda Edwards, Amy Upshaw and David Smith of the Arkan-
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