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Area ‘sitting pretty’ with abundant salt supplies

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A woman walking along South Central Avenue in Canonsburg uses an umbrella to keep away the snow as it continues to fall Monday morning.

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Observer-Reporter

Get ready for scenes like this one captured during a recent winter season in North Strabane Township.

This year’s snow drought isn’t rubbing salt in the wounds of plow truck drivers.

The mild winter in Western Pennsylvania, coupled with beefed-up salt supplies, means local public works crews are in great shape compared to this time last year when many communities quickly plowed through their stockpiles.

“Everybody learned their lesson last year,” East Finley Township roadmaster Rick Dorsey said. “We’re sitting pretty right now.”

Dorsey and other municipal officials said they prepared better for this winter by ordering more salt and other road aggregates at the end of last season.

Washington Councilman Ken Westcott said the city has enough salt to get through this round of storms and expects a new shipment by Wednesday. That was a much different story than a year ago when Washington and many other communities were forced to use anti-skid pebbles after salt supplies ran short.

“It looks like so far, so good,” Westcott said. “We wanted to take a proactive approach and get ahead of it.”

They’ve had some help from an unseasonably dry winter. Meteorologist Lee Hendricks of the National Weather Service said the area received two-tenths of an inch of snow in December, compared to the average 9.1 inches. Before Monday’s snowfall, the region received only 14.8 inches of accumulation during the season that began Oct. 1. That’s about one-third of the snowfall the area received at this time last year, when the weather service recorded 42.1 inches.

“At this point, we’re actually below normal,” he said.

But so far, the temperatures in January were colder than normal. The average high for January is 33.8 degrees, compared to an average of 19.2 degrees this month.

“Our temperatures are going to stay below normal, but there’s not a great deal of moisture” in the weather systems that the area is seeing, Hendricks said.

That’s been good new for communities trying to get ahead of last year’s shortage.

Mike Simms, the business manager for Waynesburg, said they’re “doing fine” and have used only 100 tons of salt so far this season after using 500 tons all of last year. He added the borough ordered more salt supplies at the end of last season to get a “head start” on this year.

“As mild as it’s been, there’s no supply problems this year,” Simms said. “We had a full bin to start the season. It’s not bad at all.”

Gov. Tom Wolf signed a disaster emergency proclamation for the state Monday, but this region was spared the brunt of Mother Nature’s wrath as most of the snowfall accumulated on the other side of the state. Although parts of Washington County were blanketed with several inches of snow Monday, meteorologists predict the rest of the week will remain fairly clear.

Most schools in the area were operating on a two-hour delay Monday, but Burgettstown Area School District and McGuffey School District had cancellations.

About 30 flights at Pittsburgh International Airport were canceled Monday in anticipation of a blizzard in the Northeast that was expected to bring up to two feet of snow. Airport spokeswoman Alyson Walls said most of the flights canceled were headed to or from New York, Boston and Washington, D.C. Flights were also canceled to airports in Lancaster and Altoona.

“Our runways are open. They’re clear,” Walls said. “Everything is fine on our end. It’s just we can’t send planes to these (airports) if the flights are canceled.”

Walls said some of those delays and cancelations may “spill over into” today as the airport catches up with rebooking flights.

Valerie Petersen, spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, said the department has plenty of salt and anti-skid materials in its eight stockpiles throughout the county.

“We really haven’t used as much as we have at this stage in other years,” she said.

She said the department has 106 operators and 62 plow trucks for Washington County, and it takes about two hours for a driver to treat roads before having to return to a stockpile to replenish supplies.

“We’re just always prepared, regardless of what Mother Nature is going to bring us,” she said.

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