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The Chicago area’s record-long streak of days without an inch of snow came to an end as the week began, and Lake County wasn’t spared with some areas of the county projected to receive as much as a foot of snow or more by the end of the day Tuesday, according to the National Weather Service.

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After an exceedingly mild February that saw no measurable snow and record warmth in the Chicago area, snow-plowing crews were out in full force again late Sunday and early Monday, clearing the roads for the morning commute.

“It’s an anomaly. When’s the last time we had such a low quantity of snowfall?” said David Motley, director of marketing and public relations at the city of Waukegan. “It’s not really the norm.”

But Motley added the city’s snow-management crews remained prepared for a snowstorm to strike.

Simon Nargeli, 21, of Lake Bluff, saw the snow, grabbed his camera and found himself at the Old School Forest Preserve near Libertyville taking nature shots. “This is my first stop today and I’ve been driving around and running errands and I just stop when I see something that’s worth it,” he said.

“We live in the Midwest,” Motley said. “And nothing is guaranteed in terms of weather. So they are prepared nonetheless. They just haven’t had to do a lot of it this season.”

The National Weather Service issued a lake-effect snow warning beginning Monday night and ending Tuesday afternoon for swaths of Lake County, including Waukegan. Ricky Castro, a meteorologist in the weather service’s Chicago-area office, said Monday morning that in the warning area, an additional five to nine inches of snow could fall on top of the three to six inches already on the ground.

The warning was a result of forecasters predicting shifting wind patterns that could blow storm systems southward from Wisconsin and into Lake County, Castro said.

“It could come down quite heavy at times,” he said.

The weather will remain “quite cold for a few days behind” the lake-effect snow, according to Castro, but he added, “It looks like it’ll warm up for the late-week period.

“There are no additional major snow systems that appear in the next seven days after the lake-effect,” he said.

Waukegan Public Works Director Tom Hagerty said in a statement through Motley that the city started its snow-removal operations at 4 a.m. Monday, dispatching 45 snowplows to clear 245 miles of roads, 25 miles of alleys, 175 cul-de-sacs and more than 12 municipal parking lots.

“Crews will be out again to address any additional snowfall as necessary,” he said Monday afternoon.

Angel Zires, 30, should have been resting Monday afternoon after he threw his back out moving furniture. But instead, he was shoveling snow in his driveway on Victory Street in Waukegan. He was still in good spirits, however.

“I actually enjoy (the snow) more than the extreme heat, so I’d rather have this,” Zires said.

At the county level, 29 trucks plowed 107 miles of state roads and 843 miles of county roads, said Kevin Kerrigan, engineer of maintenance at the Lake County Division of Transportation. Kerrigan said the storm “doesn’t appear to be the worst one of the season,” recalling previous snowfalls in December. But even after the snow ends, the road maintenance might not be over.

“We may get into a drifting situation with the winds picking up,” Kerrigan said.

The snow gave Kerrigan’s division an opportunity to use some of the road salt it has stockpiled during the mild winter. The county has an agreement to buy 15,000 tons of salt a year at $59.50 per ton, Kerrigan said, but it has flexibility to adjust the order to 80 percent or 120 percent of the total, depending on the weather.

At the end of last week, the county still hadn’t hit the 80 percent mark, Kerrigan said, but now, “We’ll meet the 80 percent.”

A lot of the salt used before this week was dispatched to combat freezing rain, said Brooke Hooker, a spokeswoman for the transportation division.

“Because of the couple of freezing rainstorms that we had, we used a ton of salt then,” Hooker said. “Because the rain in those conditions just washes the salt off the road.”

Other areas of the country are also bracing for snow.

U.S. airlines canceled at least 5,300 flights Monday and Tuesday, as a storm was expected to dump enough snow to disrupt travel in the Northeast. Tracking service FlightAware.com said late Monday morning that more than 1,400 flights on Monday and more than 3,900 on Tuesday had been canceled.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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