City Crews Preparing for Expected Snow; Trash Collectors Working to Catch Up

City crews Thursday worked on more residential streets throughout Tulsa, spreading sand and salt, as well as continuing to operate graders on arterial and secondary streets to remove ice.

Crews continue to work 12-hour shifts in an effort to remove as much ice as possible from arterials before the streets fill with snow from a new winter storm, which is predicted to bring significant snow accumulations to Tulsa this weekend.

Slightly warmer temperatures Thursday allowed some ice to be removed with truck-mounted snow plows. Earlier in the week the ice was so hard that truck-mounted blades were not effective in removing it. Road graders have been used to clear ice where truck-mounted plows were ineffective.
Salt suppliers throughout the middle of the nation are struggling to supply orders for many cities, counties and states in the wake of last weekend’s ice storm. Tulsa crews treated streets with more sand than salt during the recent storm because temperatures remained too low for salt to be an effective melting agent.

Sand is available from local sand producers along the Arkansas River. The City has been hauling sand from those suppliers both with City-owned trucks and with contractors’ trucks.

Trash haulers continued to battle icy conditions today. The City’s own crews ran routes and collected trash where possible. The contractor which collects residential trash in other parts of Tulsa also had its crews running regular Thursday routes. Both groups reported some customers were still
unreachable and that they found both trash containers frozen to the ground and containers with trash frozen inside which couldn’t be dumped. At least two trash collecting trucks slid from icy roads and were stuck in ditches Thursday morning.

Supervisors are keeping track of areas that could not be serviced and will make new attempts as schedules and weather conditions permit. Special services – picking up bulky wastes, dead animals, freon-bearing appliances, etc. -- will not resume until conditions permit.

Water-line repair crews are busy but keeping up with reported breaks. Eleven new breaks were reported throughout the city today and crews had begun repairs on all but two by early afternoon. No long-term interruptions in water service were expected.