A plow makes a go on North Road in Pittsfield Saturday after the storm.
PITTSFIELD — When a storm approached final Friday, Joad Bowman, a accomplice of three downtown institutions in Pittsfield, despatched employees residence early so they may race the snow.
On Tuesday, prospects who stopped in at a type of companies, LuLu’s Tiny Grocery, had been nonetheless speaking about final weekend’s frightful street circumstances — proof {that a} subject that’s now slated to come back earlier than the Metropolis Council stays on folks’s minds.
Public Utilities Commissioner Ricardo Morales stated Monday that street cleanup efforts had been hampered, first, by the surprising quantity of snow that fell Friday after which by plunging temperatures that foiled the usage of regular ice-melting strategies.
Because of this, drivers in Pittsfield spent the weekend sliding round on ice-choked streets, main the Metropolis Council president to obtain extra complaints than ever earlier than about a problem in his 20 years on the panel.
Two councilors stated Monday that Morales will current a postmortem on final weekend’s expertise to the Metropolis Council — and recommend steps the town would possibly take to forestall a replay.
Pittsfield police reported 69 minor motorized vehicle accidents between 4:15 p.m. Friday and three:51 p.m. Sunday. Across the metropolis Tuesday, folks had been nonetheless primed to speak about their weekend of white-knuckle driving.
Betty Baumert says she is used to traversing the town’s snow-slicked roads in her four-wheel drive Jeep. However by the top of the lengthy vacation weekend, with frozen precipitation nonetheless clinging to some streets, Baumert’s nerves had been shot.
“Three days of it, I couldn’t take it. It was actually harmful, it was,” stated Baumert of street circumstances in Pittsfield.
The worst of the dangerous driving got here late Friday, when the storm swept into the area and created what Baumert described as white-out circumstances that stymied her journey to Lenox for a vacation dinner. She stated she watched a car spin out in entrance of her. She managed to keep away from a collision herself.
A site visitors mishap on South Road stopped site visitors for greater than an hour, making a scary scenario for drivers, she stated.
Street circumstances appeared to abate for her when she reached the neighboring city, the place she seen the roads had been salted. “After I bought to Lenox I might put my guard down,” Baumert stated.
The roads in Pittsfield had been nonetheless slippery and scary to navigate on Saturday, Christmas Eve. That day, Pittsfield police reported 36 accidents.
Baumert understands the storm was a nasty one, however believes the town ought to have deployed extra plows.
Morales says that snow fell so quick Friday that crews couldn’t sustain, particularly with roads filled with rush hour commuters. He famous that in contrast to the state, the town doesn’t pre-treat roads magnesium chloride, which lowers the melting level of water to forestall build-ups of ice. The falling snow turned packed and become ice.
Although crews started distributing a mix of sand and rock salt, the snow had hardened to the purpose the place it resisted elimination by plows.
“Plowing doesn’t do something,” Morales stated Monday. “It’s hard-packed snow on ice on prime of the street. There’s nothing you are able to do to scrape it up. What must be achieved is breaking it, and that breaks down with supplies. With these chemical compounds the easiest way to make use of it’s pretreating earlier than it types.”
A traveler’s lament
Pam Downing recounts her expertise on the roads in Pittsfield on Tuesday from her retail job at Dory & Ginger on North Road.
“The Pittsfield roads had been terrible,” stated metropolis resident Pam Downing. She traveled out of city on Saturday. By the point she was coming residence, many Pittsfield roads had been nonetheless stippled with hardened snow and slicked with ice.
“It was nonetheless fairly bumpy,” she stated, including that it was like driving on a “washer board.”
Given the power of the storm, Haley Salzarulo borrowed her boyfriend’s Ford Escape for the weekend, trusting its hefty body over her personal Subaru Impreza sedan.
Haley Salzarulo of Pittsfield recounts driving over the vacation weekend from her job at Phoenix Theater in Pittsfield on Tuesday. Whereas Salzarulo needed to borrow a Ford Escape to get round as a result of she wasn’t in a position to navigate the roads along with her Subaru Impreza.
SUV however, Salzarulo stated the driving circumstances in Pittsfield had been “very dangerous,” particularly on among the facet streets on the west facet of the town the place she lives — and the place her car nearly bought caught within the snow.
A number of days have handed because the storm, however Salzarulo stated Tuesday that many Pittsfield streets nonetheless hadn’t been utterly cleared of snow.
“Even nonetheless at the moment I seen that it’s nonetheless fairly dangerous, particularly on smaller streets,” stated Salzarulo. “It’s shocking.”
Lately, Bowman, the downtown enterprise proprietor, stated he finds he’s “slightly extra forgiving” of metropolis officers whose job it’s to plan for and reply to conditions like storms.
When requested what he considered the town’s winter street upkeep, he cited the miles of roads that have to be handled in Pittsfield, all with restricted monetary sources.
“I believe they’re doing higher than lots of people give them credit score for,” he stated.
By Tuesday, essentially the most traveled half North Road in Pittsfield was clear, nonetheless facet streets had been nonetheless snow lined.