COLUMBUS - On Tuesday, nearly a foot of snow was dumped on to Columbus and yet many residents thought by Friday, the city streets would be easy to navigate. That is not the case.
Although the arterial streets seem to be well plowed and cleaned up, many of the other roads are still filled with snow and ice. Some residential streets are so bad, cars have been seen still getting stuck on the neighborhood streets.
Longtime Columbus resident Jim Rains is disappointed with how the city has cleaned up the roads.
“I really think they kind of failed to adequately fill the needs of the populace here. I have been a longtime resident of Columbus, since 1961, and I know we've had a lot of snow but it just seems there could have been a lot more done, a lot more quickly I think,” says Rains.
It certainly has not been an easy cleanup job for the city, the snowfall was the most Columbus has experienced all winter and winds of over 40 mph blew the snow back onto the roads after it had already been plowed.
Public Works Director Greg McCaffery says that people don't realize just how much snow hit the area.
“We received 20 plus inches of snow and that is the most significant snow that this community had received in 20 plus years, I know there are people saying that we've had bigger storms, no you haven't,” says McCaffery.
The crews, which have been working 12-14 hour shifts, have now been able to focus in on residential streets for the past two days. Every one of those roads has been done at least once, but the plows need to hit them again for several reasons.
One reason is because the snow is melting and it's creating a mushy snow with an icy bottom that makes it tough for smaller cars to maneuver. The plows also are re-visiting neighborhoods because people are finally moving their cars off the streets.
“You had a lot of people finally move their vehicles after 48 hours and once they did that on both sides of the road, it almost had looked like we had not been down through the roads, but we had. I call that spillover,” says McCaffery.
The city expects to have all the roads clear by the end of the weekend.
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