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City staff crunch numbers on ice storm aftermath
Zach Markovic / Staff Photo - Final estimates are in concerning the damage that snow and ice had on the Plano area in early February.
By Jessica Rush, jrush@acnpapers.com
The city of Plano will be looking into funding for more bad-weather equipment as a result of the ice and snow storms that blew through North Texas in early February and canceled schools for four consecutive days. City staff asked the council to consider funding to equip more trucks for sanding and to increase the stockpiles of sand and salt mixtures.
“I think I’m hearing from the council that we would like to gear up our preparation,” Mayor Phil Dyer said at last week’s city council meeting. “Hopefully, it doesn’t get used for years and years, but if it’s needed it will be there.”
The city staff gave an update on the aftermath of the arctic cold front, which began during the early morning hours on Feb. 1. It brought between 3 to 5 inches of sleet and freezing rain that made travel dangerous as it froze on the roadways. By Wednesday, Plano residents and businesses were hit with rolling brownouts due to increased power demand. The week was wrapped up on Friday with an additional 3 to 6 inches of snowfall, and temperatures did not rise above freezing until Saturday, Feb. 4.
The last time Plano experienced similar severe cold weather was in February 1996. Consecutive freezing temperatures totaled 137 hours, according to the National Weather Service.
Stovall said initial figures collected from various city departments show Plano dedicated nearly 3,000 regular and overtime hours to the storm at an estimated cost of about $224,000 for labor, materials, equipment use, etc.
For these types of events, Plano’s public works policy is to sand signalized intersections, bridges, overpasses, box culverts and certain hotspots such as hills and curves.
“We also respond to complaints we get from the police department and our citizens, as much as we can,” said Jerry Cosgrove, deputy director of public works. “Our policy does not include sanding of all lanes and major thoroughfares and residential areas.”
Plano uses its existing dump trucks and equips them with sand “spreaders” during ice operations. Cosgrove said the city has 20 dump trucks, and it would like to purchase an additional 12 spreaders to bring the number of operating sand trucks from eight to 20. The cost to add the spreaders would be about $124,000, but they would reduce the time it takes to sand approximately 400 spots in the city to six hours.
“On total, it takes us about 11 hours to do one complete pass for the entire city,” Cosgrove said. “That basically allows us to do two passes in a 24-hour time, which we don’t feel is an adequate response time for these types of events.”
Plano has three existing stockpiles of sand and salt mixtures throughout the city, which together hold 1,407 cubic yards of sand. The five days of sanding required more than 1,900 cubic yards.
“If we had not been able to get the refresh of our supply during Thursday or Friday of that week, we would have run out of sand and salt,” Cosgrove said. “I think the most critical thing right now is we want to get another stockpile in town.”
The proposed solution is to construct a fourth stockpile in the north-central part of town and enlarge the stockpile under the Dallas North Tollway and at the police academy for an estimated total cost of $85,000.
“This would about double our capacity for sand and salt in the city,” Cosgrove said.
City Manager Bruce Glasscock said if the council approved, they could look at two different funds to make it happen. The first is a disaster contingency fund.
“The other, since this is traffic safety, we could look at the red-light camera fund,” Glassock said. “Last time I checked, we had a little under $2 million in that fund.”
The council considered looking into funding the additional equipment after Chief of Police Greg Rushin reported that accidents were up about 2.7 times with an average of 36 a day during the ice and snow storm.
Sand, salt, snow: By the numbers
• 1 cubic yard of sand covers about 383 feet of one side of a major thoroughfare
• 1 cubic yard of sand/salt mixture costs approximately $35
• To sand all major thoroughfares in Plano would equate to approximately 1.6 million linear feet on both sides of the road
• To sand all major thoroughfares would take almost 550 trips and cost more than $300,000 per day
• The stockpile required to sand the entire city would be 8,700 cubic yards of sand, or six times the city’s current stockpile
• To sand the entire city in 12 hours would take 61 trucks
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