District digs out after snow storm
Dry conditions forecast for the next several days should give road crews and residents a chance to clear away the average 4 to 6 inches of snow that provided the area with its first significant accumulation of the season Thursday. Schools from throughout the region closed their doors, giving the youngsters an unexpected vacation day, and motorists faced a challenge during morning commutes.
“The storm arrived from Alabama to the mid-Atlantic coast last night and into (Thursday),” said Brad Rehak, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Pittsburgh.
Rehak said this was a normal snow for this time of year, but it may have seemed severe in comparison to relatively mild winters of recent years.
“This was a pretty good snowstorm for the mid-Atlantic region. We haven’t’ seen much like this in the last couple years, relatively speaking,” he said.
The state Department of Transportation District 12 in Uniontown put 43 operators and 43 trucks out on area roads throughout the day, said PennDOT spokeswoman Valerie Petersen. She said the department had the regular crews available and more on call, and they worked hard to keep up with the snow that came in fast and heavy during the morning rush hour.
“There was a delay in clearing the roads because the cars were out there,” she said. “First, they did the primary roadways to keep traffic moving on the major arteries. Then, they did the secondary roads. They have all been treated, but they are still out there working. The snow stopped and they were able to catch up with most of the roads. Some have slush.”
She said the PennDOT employees would stay on call Thursday night.
A trouble spot in the area was the Summit Mountain, where PennDOT crews helped stabilize and free a tractor-trailer truck that got stuck on Route 40 east in Hopwood, closing the road to other traffic. Petersen said the truck had slid sideways and backward and hit a guardrail. She received the call around 8 a.m., and the roadway was cleared and opened around noon.
Trooper Brian Burden, public information officer for the state police at Uniontown, credited PennDOT’s efforts for minimizing problems for the state police. Burden tallied six traffic accidents from 1:10 a.m. to 3:10 p.m. He did not have exact causes listed, but he reasoned those crashes could have been due to the weather.
However, Burden said that number did not reflect a significant increase in traffic accidents for the area from any other day.
Likewise, Allegheny Power had little out of the ordinary to report.
“We had a pretty good day. The storm really didn’t affect our day-to-day operations. We had a few scattered outages, but it was nothing out of the ordinary or storm-related,” said spokeswoman Tara Curtis.
Curtis said what helped the utility was that the snow was not heavy and there was no ice. Still, crews monitored the power system throughout the day.
The weather service for Thursday had predicted 2 to 5 inches of snow for much of northern and eastern Pennsylvania and 1 to 4 inches of snow for central Pennsylvania, with the accumulation light in the north and heavier in the south.
The Associated Press reported that the storm, before it hit Pennsylvania, spread freezing rain and as much as a foot of snow from the Texas Panhandle to Virginia on Wednesday. More than 100,000 people lost power. Slippery roads were blamed in at least six traffic deaths, including two each in Kentucky and Missouri and one each in Tennessee and North Carolina.
“It is the same storm that hit the South yesterday. It wasn’t supposed to hold together like it did. It was supposed to curve to the coast. It just took longer to do that,” Bob Higgins, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Pittsburgh, told the news service.
Rehak said the weather would be dry for a few days, although he predicted a chance of snow showers on Sunday. Next week, he said, the temperatures would be near to above normal and mostly dry into the middle of next week.
As for the long-range forecast, Rehak said the outlook is for a drier-than-normal conditions and a little warmer-than-normal winter.