With a near snowless 2017 to date, Lake County officials are saying that although they may have saved some money on plowing and salt, Mother Nature has still kept them plenty busy.
The lack of snow since New Year’s Day has meant that plow crews have not earned the overtime hours they usually do clearing the streets, Barrington Public Works Director Mark Werksman said.
In Barrington, he said, the village is “still saving on that budget between salt and overtime. Obviously that helps our cause.”
Overtime hours, though, are cyclical, Highland Park Director of Public Works Ramesh Kanapareddy said.
He pointed out that during December’s snowstorms, crews worked three weekends in a row, allowing them to earn a generous amount of overtime.
Even still, with January’s other weather events, such as 50 mph winds that downed trees, crews have still worked some overtime, he said. There were also water main breaks over the Martin Luther King holiday weekend, he said.
There are “plenty of other things that Mother Nature throws at us that keeps our staff busy for extra hours work,” Kanapareddy said, like freezing rains which put salt trucks on the road.
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“We agree, we don’t use as much salt as a snow event,” Kanapareddy said, but the roads still need to be treated.
Highland Park’s dome can hold about 2,000 tons of salt, he said. Right now, the stock is down to about 500 pounds.
The village can order salt as needed, since they do not have a large storage dome for it.
“There is a possibility that we will have salt left over, which will help next season,” Kanapareddy said.
“I’d rather have the issue of too much salt than not enough,” Werksman said.
The National Weather Services reported that in Mundelein, the January snowfall totaled 1.1 inches, the lowest total since the turn of the century. The next lowest total recorded there since 2000 was 1.6 inches in 2001. In 2016, Mundelein saw 4.4 inches in January.
O’Hare International Airport saw 0.6 inches of snow last month, compared to 17.7 inches in December, the National Weather Service reported.
Though the service does not predict snow outlooks, people in charge of plowing snow, like Werksman, say they are well stocked with salt if its needed.
“We are under our annual usage right now because of the mild weather,” Werksman said.
With the famed groundhog predicting last week that there will be six more weeks of winter, there is no predicting what kind of weather we might have.
“Nothing is average or normal any more in terms of weather,” Werksman said.
Erin Gallagher is a freelance reporter for the News-Sun.