County set for next storm

More snow coming on Sunday evening

NORRISTOWN — The Montgomery County commissioners announced Friday they are prepared to combat the foot of snow expected to fall on Montgomery County Sunday night and into Monday.

“We expect it in our area, it will largely be a snow event,” commissioners’ Chairman Josh Shapiro said at a press conference. “I can tell you we are prepared. We have 600 tons of salt on hand in Montgomery County for our roadways.”

Previous media reports indicated several municipalities in Montgomery County were running low on salt, but Shapiro said municipalities that reported salt shortages have an ample amount of salt to get them through the storm.

“None of them are reporting any problematic shortfalls at this time. They all feel they are prepared for whatever Mother Nature has in store for us,” Shapiro said.

“We anticipated the salt issue at a meeting three weeks ago, and that’s why we’re in a position now to say that we have 600 tons of salt available,” Commissioner Bruce Castor said. “We’re confident we’ll be able to deal with any emergencies that might come up the remainder of the winter.”

Castor advised those who don’t have to drive not to, so as to prevent another accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike like the one on Feb. 14 that involved more dozens of vehicles and left more than 30 people injured.

“In the bad weather situation, the fewer cars on the road, the more opportunity there is for emergency people to do their job and we can avoid things like what happened on the turnpike,” he said.

Shapiro said many people have heeded his warnings during the previous storm about staying off of the roads in the snow that followed the ice.

“We ended up having fewer 911 calls largely because people heeded the advice we have them to stay off the roads and allowed the plows to do their jobs and allowed the salt to work,” he said.

Shapiro said he met with representatives from the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency and emergency coordinators from surrounding counties on

Thursday to find a better way to handle future winter storms.

“We know that we needed to make in-roads with PECO on better coordination,” Shapiro said, adding it would be good if PECO could send the county a few teams that would be able to go out to a scene when the county learns about it, rather than waiting for PECO to hear about an incident.

Commissioners would like to see faster response times, especially with trees and power lines falling down and major roads throughout the county, Shapiro said.

“The time it took to clear those roads, quite frankly, took too long,” he said. “We think we have now learned from the past storm and are now in a position to better deal with future storms.”

Operations

will

run more smoothly if the county is able to have PECO crews assigned to the county, Shapiro said. If a tree takes down a power line, PECO must first inspect the line to see if it is still live. If it isn’t, they turn clearing the street over to the municipality.

In the previous ice storm a couple of weeks ago, the commissioners is- sued and disaster declaration, and Gov. Tom Corbett followed suit by declaring one for Pennsylvania. President Barack Obama also declared a disaster in Pennsylvania.

The three declarations gave the state a chance to receive federal money for recovery if it met a certain threshold of damage. Montgomery County had to meet a threshold of $2.8 million.

“We in fact did meet that $2.8 million threshold. We hit a threshold of $3.2 million,” Shapiro said.

For any money to be received for storm recovery, the state must meet a threshold of $17 million of damage before PEMA can determine how much money Montgomery County will get back.