Digging goes on and on

Published 10:39 pm Monday, December 29, 2008

Snowplows came through early along Highway 530 near Oso.

That was Jennifer Koch’s first problem. The plows piled the snow up along the entrance to the driveway she shares with several neighbors, blocking all their cars.

While the snowstorm raged outside, a blizzard of problems accosted Koch inside. The pipes in her home froze, then the power went out.

Koch took her two children and headed to Arlington to stay with friends.

When she returned to her home a few days later, she found herself snowed out.

“The plow had come by again, and we had to shovel our way in,” she said.

Koch and her neighbors spent Monday shoveling out piles of slush. She said her area got 30 inches of snow over the course of the two-week series of storms, and it simply won’t go away.

“I had to call in to work,” Koch said. “With all this slushiness that’s so thick, I can’t guarantee that I can get my car out.”

Snow and ice incapacitated much of Snohomish County in the worst winter storm most residents here can remember. Nearly every home was inundated with deep drifts and slick sidewalks, and snowplow crews scrambled to keep up and the snow just kept falling.

In Everett, plow crews piled snow onto cars.

“If we were to not do those areas at all, we would have been in a bigger mess,” city spokeswoman Kate Reardon said. “The best advice for those folks is to get the shovel out and start digging.”

Though some residents who live on streets that haven’t been plowed yet weren’t impressed with how Everett handled the snow, Reardon believes that, overall, the city deserves an A-plus for its response.

“We were on the streets,” she said. “We were responding. Our buses were running very close to, if not on, schedule every day. So our city was still moving in this unprecedented snow.”

As of 8 a.m. Monday, Everett crews had plowed 7,561 miles of road and sanded 5,042 miles, Reardon said. Crews paid special attention to the streets in south Everett around the Boeing Co., the city’s top employer.

“This is one of the largest storms we’ve ever had to deal with,” said Steve Thomsen, Snohomish County’s public works director. “I’ve lived here for 22 years, and I’ve never seen this extended length of snow on the ground.”

County crews drove 35 plows day and night during the two weeks of storms, Thomsen said. Employees worked 12-hour shifts, seven days a week. Those shifts alternated, so county crews were on the road 24 hours each day.

About 160 county employees worked in response to the storm, whether driving a plow, working in the maintenance shop or other jobs, Thomsen said. Many of those workers clocked in more than 40 hours of overtime each week. Crews returned to regular daytime schedules on Monday.

Still, it wasn’t enough.

“We’ve received hundreds and hundreds of phone calls, and we’re still getting them coming in a pretty heavy stream,” Thomsen said. “East of Highway 9, it’s still a lot of deep snow, and very difficult driving conditions.”

Plows have trapped countless vehicles in driveways and in parking spots along roads by piling snow up against them, Thomsen said.

“We would plow a road and half the people would say, ‘Thank you for plowing,’ and the other half would say, ‘Thank you for damming up my driveway; now I can’t get out,’ ” Thomsen said. “So the real dilemma was deciding the lesser of two evils.”

Plow drivers bypassed roads where they believed the service would cause more of a problem, Thomsen said.

The storm blew past the $970,000 county road maintenance budget for snow and ice removal by more than $600,000, Thomsen said. The extra expense likely will be covered using unspent payroll. None of it will come out of the county’s general fund, he said.

Other costs from the storm’s damage haven’t been assessed. The front part of the plows are usually edged in rubber, but the rubber was removed to handle hard ice, Thomsen said. That means many raised road markers were torn off by plows, he said.

Those might not be replaced until the spring, he said.

Cities and towns throughout the county are grappling with how to pay for the storm, and how to dispose of tons of snow. Crews for nearly all the communities worked around the clock beginning on or shortly after Dec. 13, when the snow began to fall, until at least this past weekend.

About 5 feet of snow fell in Darrington during the storm, Mayor Joyce Jones said. Most streets have just one lane open to traffic because of piles of plowed snow that reached up to 10 feet tall. Many streets aren’t passable at all.

“Our little town is just about buried,” Jones said. “We did what we could, but now we need help.”

Darrington officials have contracted with local owners of plows and dump trucks to move the snow out of town. Those rigs are expected to begin working at 8 a.m. today.

In Arlington, even nonstop work couldn’t cope with the 2 1/2 feet of snow that remained on the ground on Monday.

Clearing main streets, such as 172nd Street NE in Smokey Point, was the city’s top priority, assistant city administrator Kristin Banfield said. Some side streets Monday morning still hadn’t been plowed. All Arlington streets were scheduled to be plowed by Monday evening. City workers also have been plowing snow at the municipal airport, which was closed because of snow.

“We’ve got to get these main streets cleared and keep them open,” Banfield said. “We understand that the neighborhoods have not been great, but we’ve been working our butts off.”

Banfield said the city could have handled the storm better.

“We did OK,” Banfield said. “We could have done better. We always can do better, but we’re doing the best that we can given what we’ve got and the staffing we have available and the amount of time it takes to get two-and-a-half feet of snow off roads.”

There was little help available for people who needed to get their vehicles towed. By Monday, when the worst of the storm’s remains were melting in many areas, people reported waiting for three hours for tow trucks sent by AAA, spokeswoman Cassie Devaney said.

Usually the tow companies contracting with the association take 45 minutes to respond. The most common calls were from drivers stuck in their driveways, she said.

In Marysville, emergency crews battled the snow and ice when they tried to reach people in distress. A medic truck was stuck in the ice and drifts several times, and firefighters were forced to carry patients from their homes, down snowy driveways, to waiting rigs, Marysville Fire District spokeswoman Kristen Thorstenson said.

Gretchell Fire Chief Travis Hots said chains strapped to the tires of fire engines slowed their speed to about 25 mph.

In his 15 years working as a firefighter in Snohomish County, he said he can’t remember when the roads have been this bad for so long.

Hots said he drove around the fire district Monday and only a few private roads still were covered with snow.

Communities that maintain their own roads need to make contingency plans for snow removal should another big storm hit, he said. Deep snow and ice has the potential to prevent emergency crews from reaching someone in trouble.

“There’s a good possibility that we’re going to be extremely delayed and may not be able to get a fire apparatus or an aid car into them in a timely manner,” he said.

Snohomish County sheriff’s deputies chained up too, spokeswoman Rebecca Hover said.

The warmer weather was a welcome relief.

“It’s been nasty out there,” she said. “I’ve never been so happy to see rain in all my life.”

Herald reporter Gale Fiege contributed to this report.

Reporter Krista J. Kapralos: 425-339-3422 or kkapralos@heraldnet.com.