AFTERMATH OF THE STORM

By Bryan Dean and Augie Frost
Staff Writers

Overworked and over budget, Oklahoma City road crews struggled Monday to clear the snow routes before thousands of area residents return to work today from a holiday weekend.

Mike DeGiacomo, who heads the street maintenance division, said he's already spent double his $100,000 budget on salt after the second major storm of the season. He estimated crews have put 6,000 tons of salt on city streets since the storm hit Friday.

The city's bottom line also took a hit from manpower costs. As many as 100 workers have operated 25 to 30 salt trucks in 12-hour shifts nonstop during the icy weather, DeGiacomo said. They were paid overtime for working the weekend and extra pay for working Monday, which was Martin Luther King Jr. Day and a paid holiday for city employees.

DeGiacomo put the city's cost of responding to the weather at more than $150,000 so far. That cost will go up overnight as crews continue to clear emergency routes. DeGiacomo said only about half the snow routes were plowed by noon Monday.

"We hope to have all of that plowing completed by rush hour in the morning,” DeGiacomo said. "We'll probably have to put some more salt out tonight. With the sunshine, you'll have snow and ice turning to water, and you'll have that refreeze effect.”
I find it a little distressing that Oklahoma City does not have the resources to deal with these weather events better. I'd like to see the economic impact of not having these roads cleared and just using this "stay at home" plan. Our company is not very big, but I can certainly say that it has cost us 10s of thousands of dollars in lost sales. In fact, I could probably get close to the 100k "salt" budget alone if I did some creative accounting.

I know these events don't happen multiple times every year for us, but it seems that there is at least one "stay at home" event every year. I don't know if the budget discussed in the article is fiscal or calendar based, but either way it seems pretty ridiculous that we'd be over budget just on this event, especially considering that the response was pretty weak.

I don't know, but if Oklahoma City wants to be a major economic player, it can't just shut down every time we get some winter weather. Now if this was entirely a product of the severity of the storm, I'd understand, but it clearly is not. This is 100% an issue of not committing the resources to deal with the events that we do have.