Road-clearing machinery stuck as city works to open icy streets
An indication that the roads are treacherous from a record-tying accumulation of snow is that the heavy equipment being used to clear the routes had themselves gotten stuck.
Mayor Shirley Washington, who had made a point to get city street department crews out and working to remove snow and ice from the more heavily traveled thoroughfares, said Thursday afternoon that three road graders had been out scraping ice and snow from streets but that two of them had become stuck.
“Our streets are so slick,” Washington said. “The graders were on slopes and started sliding, and once they started sliding, the operator had no control.”
The mayor said workers were using other vehicles to get the graders back in action. She said the city started with five crews but that one was out of commission because a part on one of the pieces of machinery failed and a replacement part was unavailable.
Washington said the city had borrowed two graders from Jefferson County and was renting two more. The focus, she said, will be around Jefferson Regional hospital so that emergency vehicles and others can get to the hospital and also on other main thoroughfares in the city.
Another area the city is working on is around the campus of the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, where meals have to be delivered to some students who have off-campus housing, Washington said. Because of the snow-covered streets, those deliveries are difficult to impossible.
Even with the street-clearing work that has gone on, the streets are still very difficult to traverse, Washington said. To help get medical personnel and other staff to Jefferson Regional, used four-wheel drive vehicles were borrowed from Trotter Ford, she said. Two-wheel drive vehicles, she said, were “useless” on the slick streets. In some cases, she said, drivers of those types of cars and trucks had gotten stuck, causing unnecessary traffic problems.
On Tuesday, the sun broke out for a while and partially thawed some of the roadways. But with the cold temperatures, that water quickly froze, turning the streets into sheets of ice that were covered by Wednesday’s additional snow.
“It’s so easy to become stuck,” Washington said. “We’re pleading with people to be patient and to stay off the roads. We’re asking people to stay home.”
Other than a few fender benders, there have been no serious accidents, Washington said, adding that she has stayed in touch with the city’s street department, police department and the Arkansas Department of Transportation, which is working to clear the Martha Mitchell Expressway and Olive Street.
Even with all of the work the city is doing to make the roads safer to travel, Washington said it will take this weekend’s warmer temperatures to set things right again.
“The higher temperatures and melting is what we need,” Washington said. “Saturday’s high is 40 and Sunday’s is 53. That will really help the situation.”
The fact that the temperatures have been so low has contributed to the amount of snow on the ground, according to the National Weather Service, which has called this week’s weather “historic.”
John Lewis, a meteorologist with the service, said Pine Bluff had an estimated 14 inches of snow accumulation on Thursday morning, tying a record set in 1892.
“That shows that it is extraordinarily rare to have this much snow on the ground in Pine Bluff,” he said. “That says a lot that what the city received tied the all-time record.”
Lewis said the city got 5 to 6 inches of snow on Monday and then around 10 inches on Wednesday. During Wednesday’s storm, Pine Bluff was experiencing the heaviest snowfall in the state, Lewis said, adding that the same band of snow that hit Pine Bluff had gone through Hope, Arkadelphia, Malvern, Sheridan, Pine Bluff and then on to Stuttgart.
The key to the additional snow accumulation, Lewis said, was the extremely low temperatures, including a low of zero on Monday night, that kept Monday’s snow from melting.
“That was the other facet,” Lewis said. “That it was this cold for this long made it possible.”