PRINTJust so you snow
How Columbia clears a path through the powder
ADAM WISNESK
Cars and a home stand buried in snow north of downtown on Tenth Street in 2006. An early December blizzard left 15.3 inches of fluff covering Columbia.
January 21, 2010 | 12:00 a.m. CST
Every year, there are a handful of days when you can really appreciate the winter weather — the first snow and its glittering possibility, Christmas day carried by Bing Crosby carols. And then here come your wake-up calls — a snowstorm just before New Year’s Eve, followed by another on January 8 — leaving in their wake a slushy, slippery, freezing mess. But as you slop your way to work, there are other Columbians out there for whom the slop is the work.
Professor of Atmospheric Science Anthony Lupo says the northern half of the state will experience 110 days with temperatures below 32 degrees. During that time, Columbia typically gets around 20 inches of snow, spread among six to eight falls, which might stay on the ground up to a week. Records aren’t kept of ice accumulation, but Lupo says the cold air masses from the north and warm air masses from the south can often combine to form precipitation that freezes on the ground. The city usually gets three to six occurrences of sleet or freezing rain. With this in mind, the city’s winter-weather warriors have strategized methods to move the wet stuff and break down the ice efficiently. But like all things bureaucratic, the tasks are divided and divided again.
Everyone in the snow business is impressed by just how much material they use to move snow, the numbers of which they emphatically tell anyone who asks.
The MU landscaping facility uses 32 pieces of equipment: plows, trucks, skid loaders and salt trucks (not used in the parking structures — salt is corrosive to cars).
The Parks and Rec department has approximately eight pieces of equipment, including blade attachments to equipment used during different seasons.
C&C construction owns 10 and leases 45 motorized vehicles, including four de-icer trucks operated by 12 workers, and they have 14 workers on crews doing the manual shoveling.
Columbia snow plows leave the Grissom Building on Lakeview Avenue just south of Interstate 70 ...
Cold time, winter in the city
According to Jill Stedem, public information specialist for Columbia, should the snow show, the city’s plan goes like this: When the snowfall exceeds four inches, the fleet roars out of the Grissom Building on Lakeview Avenue just south of Interstate 70. Like spiders spinning webs, the trucks are off to their predetermined, practiced snow routes that cover about 500 miles of roads. Critical streets with curves and hills are at the top of the list, followed by first priority streets — those that see the most traffic (such as Broadway and Green Meadows) and roads needed for access to hospitals and schools. Next come second priority smaller streets, and finally residential roads. If cars on the streets make it too narrow for the truck, or if the streets are private, such as certain university roads or apartment complex parking lots, the city doesn’t plow them.
MoDot claims jurisdiction over the interstate and county roads, and it too divides and conquers based on priority: The interstates come first, followed by lettered and numbered roads — which “may be impeded until priority one roads are cleared,” as the MoDot Web site warns.
In addition to moving the snow, the city lays down a mixture of salt and cinders with calcium chloride to melt the ice. Generally, the city avoids using the cinders in The District because of the dark slush they create.
There’s no set time for how long the process takes; it depends on conditions. Stedem gets complaints about the city not moving fast enough, not clearing a road well enough and city plows leaving freshly shoveled driveways in a snowdrift. But, Stedem points out, most don’t realize the difference between city, county and state streets, not all of which the city is responsible for.
The Columbia Parks and Recreation department does a share of the snow moving for the city. This year, according to Grounds and Facilities Supervisor Mark Kottwitz, it faced a 3 percent budget cut, so the department switched from ice melt priced at $16 for 50 pounds to rock salt costing $70 per ton.
When it comes to snow season, Parks and Rec is busy with the walkways and hard surface trails of parks — the ones closest to the street, that is. The department pays special attention to the sidewalks near schools. They also clear the ARC, the Gordon Shelter Drive (for the sledders, of course) and several other recreation areas.
As for public schools, Missouri requires six snow days to be built into their academic schedules, and that, combined with a contracted snow service, makes Community Relations Coordinator Michelle Baumstark feel that they’re prepared.
Schools avoid the snow daze
Pete Millier, MU director of campus facilities and landscape services, explains how he makes sure the university never closes. To him, it’s simple: “Plan your work; work your plan.”
First and foremost, it’s the hospitals because as Millier points out, we could all end up there. Next he works the roads that are the university’s responsibility, such as Missouri and Virginia avenues. Then it’s to the sidewalks, the campus entities, such as residential life and recreational service buildings, and the handicap-access parking areas.
Attending a university in mid-Missouri means snow days are few and far between (MU classes have only been cancelled because of snow once in the past decade). But should the possibility of a snowpocalypse present itself, Millier will be in connection with the chief of police and Jackie Jones, MU’s vice chancellor. At 6 a.m., after hours of monitoring and assessing the damage to come, Jones notifies the chancellor if a decision needs to be made about school closing. After that, they “blast out on news media,” Millier says.
It’s the type of job made for a former scout leader: Millier always needs to be prepared, in more ways than a cliché can suggest. Nonetheless, he says with a laugh, “We don’t want to be too good at moving snow because that means that we’ve gotten a lot of practice.”
For Stephens College and Columbia College, it’s a much smaller operation. Their snow fleets mainly consist of plow blades and brushes attached to equipment already in stock — such as mowers and trucks. Jim Innes, grounds supervisor at Columbia College, says that mostly the college takes care of the sidewalks by shoveling and de-icing where necessary. Lee Curtis, director of facilities at Stephens, agrees, explaining it’s only when bigger storms hit that the parking lots are contracted out.
De-icing The District
Private properties, both residential and commercial, are left to take care of their own snow and ice. And the larger the property, the bigger the responsibility.
Located at the corner of Ninth and Locust, the Missouri United Methodist Church dominates the entire block, with four lengths of sidewalk and a parking lot to worry about, on a Sunday nonetheless. The church tried volunteers, but it was difficult to ask people to always be at the ready, especially when snowstorms threaten to strike even at 3 a.m. When you’re a church, the snowiest time is also the busiest time — Christmas at United Methodist can bring in approximately 3,000 attendees. Business manager Bob Elliott is now satisfied with using Watson Concrete, which gives the church priority treatment on Sundays or days of major church events.
In The District, storefronts are maintained differently depending on their landlord or lease agreement. Alley A Realty, which owns buildings home to businesses such as Kaldi’s, Café Berlin and Elly’s Couture, contracts all its snow removal. Others take care of the snow for themselves. Calhoun’s on Broadway does its best to keep its walkways clean by hiring local handyman Mark Anderson. In between his visits, partner Lisa Klenke says the employees clean during the day and always have salt on hand. “We need to have customers, and we need to have them not get hurt,” Klenke says.
Not everyone in Columbia feels as though he or she needs to roll out the big guns to handle a Columbia winter. Emmalee Leicht, assistant manager of Noodles & Company, says the store employees will probably just take care of the snow themselves. “We don’t have a procedure,” Leicht says. “The procedure is we have a snow shovel and rock salt. That’s our procedure.”
Although it’s a lot of work and money to keep The District cleared and ice-free, many in the business crowd seem to agree that it would be unnecessary for the city to take care of the sidewalks. As John Ott, landlord for Alley A Realty says: “There are so many other issues to tackle. This isn’t Iowa or Minnesota. We get through it.”
No business like snow business
For people in the winter-weather business, it’s a game of watching, waiting and for some, getting up every hour on the hour — such as founder and president of C&C Construction Kas Carlson.
If you’ve ever wondered what happens to construction workers in the winter or snow removers in the summer, it turns out they’re the same people, at least when it comes to C&C Construction. The company, which does commercial building in the warmer months, focuses on snow removal in the winter for larger private businesses such as Shoppes on Stadium, the State Farm regional office and Walmart. That’s not to say it won’t take on smaller jobs when necessary: Carlson remembers once driving a nurse to the hospital to make her shift, and another time his employees helped an elderly woman whose feet they happened to see sticking in the air on their way back from a job.
For C&C, snow removal is not to be taken lightly. During a storm, the C&C conference room morphs into a war room, the chalkboard filled to the last inch with detailed plans of attack, the names of buildings connected by hand-drawn lines and X’s. “We’re a force out to fight the snow,” Carlson says.
But this isn’t a volunteer army drafted against its will. The snow pushing C&C provides comes at a price. Carlson says it’s hard to put a number on the cost of his trade due to all the extraneous factors, but yes, it’s in the thousands.
The storm on January 8 called Carlson’s workers out for 18 hours as they “pretty much battled all night long,” Carlson says. But though plowing and de-icing at three in the morning might be one person’s circle of hell, it is another person’s meal ticket, and Carlson is quick to mention that if you’re in the snow business, you want it to snow.
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