City Announces Upgrades to Snow Plan

By John Sharp

Although city motorists and residents will be the ultimate judges, KCMO city officials announced before this season’s first snow of one to two inches November 30 that it is better prepared than ever to keep city streets as safe as possible when it snows, and that seemed to generally be the case for the first snow.

The November 29 announcement noted that the city has added 50 trucks and 100 drivers to its Snow Team comprised of employees from multiple city departments and now has 300 trucks and over 400 Snow Team trained employees to clear the 6,400 lane miles on 103 snow clearing routes.

The city is now also staffing a Snow Command Center 24 hours a day during severe winter weather to provide assistance to Snow Team drivers on each shift and to respond promptly to 311 calls about slick spots.

Michael Shaw, KCMO Public Works Department Director, said the city’s revised plan calls for aggressively pre-treating major city streets (as well as curves and hills) before snowstorms to minimize icing and snow accumulation. For a few years the city has been utilizing magnesium chloride to treat major streets which is less harmful to the environment and works better at lower temperatures than standard calcium chloride which works best at temperatures about 20 degrees or above.

Now residential streets also are being pre-treated with magnesium chloride called “Ice Ban”.

The revised plan also calls for plowing residential streets curb to curb when possible. instead of just clearing a single lane as has been done in the past and utilizing tandem plowing with multiple trucks to clear wider multi-lane arterial streets on the first pass.

Motorists should not park on designated emergency snow routes (that are marked with signs) during snowstorms and should only park on the north side of other east-west streets and on the west side of other north-south streets to allow as much of the width of the streets to be plowed or treated as possible.