Snow removal goes smoothly in Grand Island
by
Jordan Shefte
Story Created:
Feb 6, 2012 at 6:56 PM CDT
Story Updated:
Feb 6, 2012 at 7:49 PM CDT
Well, as predicted, that snow hit this weekend. While you were able to relax and stay indoors,the street crews weren't as lucky. News 5's Jordan Shefte met with the Grand Island Street Superintendent Monday.
The snow removal process took hours for them to complete.
Crews were able to get out around 1:30 Saturday morning, and worked while the streets didn't have much traffic.
They went over the emergency routes twice in that time, and then moved on to the residential neighborhoods. While clean-up went smoothly, it could have still been improved, that's if, cars wouldn't have parked on emergency snow routes.
"I think it went really good, the snow stopped sooner than we thought it would, so that was awesome for us," said Grand Island Street Superintendent Shannon Callahan.
The Grand Island Street Department is chalking this weekend up as a successful clean-up, with just a few minor glitches.
"The snow was really wet and heavy and we had all that rain right before so it really like started to clump together so there was some really big like chunks left when it would slide off the top of the plow," said Callahan.
Not only did the street department have to deal with the heavy snow, but they also had to work around fallen tree limbs.
"Some of our strobe lights get knocked out and then some of our windshield wipers get broken because of the tree limbs," said Callahan.
Those tree limbs caused obstacles, but so did cars parked on emergency snow routes.
"It's just really important for people to move their cars off of those emergency routes so that we can clear the snow all the way off the street," said Callahan.
"We ended up towing seven vehicles on the snow routes, total 13 were ticketed," Grand Island Police Captain Pete Kortum.
A parking ticket will cost you $10, but it's the towing that can really start adding up.
"It's a minimal tow charge of 90 bucks, and there's impound fee of $30, $10 a day, so they're looking at usually at least $130 on up," said Kortum.
It's a large chunk of change, that can be avoided.
"When we know, and have good reason to believe when things are going to hit, they'll have the announcement in advance, and that was the case here so that's not a secret," Kortum said.
As we told you, 7 cars were towed in Grand Island for being parked on Emergency Snow routes.
In Hastings, 5 cars were towed, and in Kearney, 3 cars were towed in the downtown area alone.
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