Illinois
Romeoville, Illinois struggles with surplus of road salt
ROMEOVILLE, Ill. (CBS) — Transportation crews were spread out around the Chicago area Wednesday evening, dropping salt to prevent slick areas ahead of the coming freezing rain and ice.
But in southwest suburban Romeoville, there was a rather unusual problem — too much salt to store.
Crews loaded up and out the gates and hit the road to combat the coming freezing rain by about 3 p.m. Tuesday. Before that, grounds foreman Scott Norman spent the afternoon filling up the Romeoville fleet with salt.
But while they’ll need plenty of salt for that purpose, they have a salt surplus because they are buying less each year — and the mild winters leave them with larger stockpiles.
Romeoville Public Works Director Chris Drey said the village has a huge stockpile — 2,000 tons of salt in one of their two domes.
“We have normally been able to dial our salt in pretty well from year to year,” said Drey. “This is just a perfect storm of everything.”
Drey said Romeoville has typically bought 4,000 to 5,000 tons of salt each year. But the past two winters, they have dialed back to 2,000 or less.
The new salt trucks in Romeoville have the technology to turn on and off the spreaders automatically. The village also uses more pre-treatment brine — which saves on salt along with the new spreaders.
But the mild winters are what have the biggest effect.
“Just everything it seems to have either gone north or south of us,” Drey said.
Drey said Romeoville is still under contract to pick up another 1,500 tons of salt from the State of Illinois, but the village currently does not have the space to store it. The village is thus exploring the idea of third-party storage.
“There is a monthly fee for that, so it was not to our advantage to do that,” Drey said.
Drey said the third-party storage was costly.
“I don’t remember the exact dollar amount, but it was definitely not worth our effort to do that at the time,” he said.
Instead, the Village of Romeoville will clear out space near the wastewater slurry, and wait as long as possible to pick up the rest of this season’s salt.
Drey said in the past municipalities would borrow or sell salt, but he thinks a lot of their neighbors are in the same situation.
Their crews were expected to be on the road dropping salt until about midnight.
CENTRALIA, Ill. – An investigation is underway after multiple people were shot Sunday in Centralia, Illinois, according to a report from WFCN News in southern Illinois.
FOX 2 has confirmed the Illinois State Police is investigating a shooting and taking over the investigation, but ISP could not confirm many further details as of 9 p.m. Sunday.
“The investigation is in its infancy and to protect the integrity of the investigation, no additional details will be released at this time,” ISP said in a statement to FOX 2.
According to WFCN News, the shooting happened around 5 p.m. near the 900 block of East Kell Street in Centralia. Multiple law enforcement agencies have since responded to scene and multiple victims are hospitalized, according to the report.
It’s unclear how many people may have been injured and what led up to the shooting.
Centralia, Illinois is about 70 miles, or just over an hour, east of St. Louis.
This is a developing story. FOX 2 will update as more information becomes available.
The National Weather Service has teams of storm surveryors in the field April 18 investigating several reports of severe storms and tornado touch downs across eastern Iowa, northwest Illinois and northeast Missouri.
According to the weather service’s website, windgusts of up to 60 to 70 mph along with teacup-sized hail and several tornadoes were reported April 17.
Many homes and outbuildings were damaged, trees were uprooted and power lines were downed in Lena, Illinois, where the most significant damage occurred, the site pointed out.
Very strong winds also were reported near Washington, Iowa, and Colmar, Illinois, where several outbuildings and grain bins were destroyed.
The weather service received reports of confirmed and possible tornadoes in the areas of Lena, Pecatonica, Shirland, Rockton, Roscoe and Capron.
The teams will be assessing damage this weekend into next week along with county emergency management teams to determine what types of storms occurred and their paths.
Dozens of power outages were reported, as well.
As of the afternoon of April 18, ComEd was reporting 85 active power outages across northern Illinois, down from 241 on April 17, and 6,751 customers affected, down from more than 18,000.
The bulk of those outages and the most customers impacted are concentrated in Jo Daviess and Stephenson counties.
Freeze Watch
from MON 12:00 AM CDT until MON 9:00 AM CDT, Lake County, Kankakee County, La Salle County, DuPage County, Northern Will County, DeKalb County, Southern Will County, Kendall County, Southern Cook County, Northern Cook County, Grundy County, Eastern Will County, Kane County, McHenry County, Lake County, Newton County, Jasper County, Porter County
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