Jan. 6—The relentless snow may have stopped, but that doesn’t mean it’s safe to leave the house yet.
City of St. Joseph street maintenance crews are busy plowing additional routes on Monday after enduring blizzard conditions all day Sunday.
“Last night, the snow let up at about 9 o’clock, and we were able to move in on that smaller night crew and get a couple of the emergency snow routes plowed completely,” Jackson Jones, St. Joseph’s superintendent of streets and infrastructure, said.
Cars are required to be removed from snow routes after city officials initiated Phase II of the emergency snow ordinance. Jones said crews will concentrate on all emergency routes on Monday.
“We’re trying to get them out as fast as we can,” he said. “Whenever we get everybody out on the street, we should have about 12 trucks out, which will make six teams because you plow in teams.”
Crews are steady at work, and Jones estimates that plowing the entire city could take until the weekend because of the amount of snowfall over the weekend. St. Joseph tallied 13 inches of snow.
Jones encouraged drivers to be aware of their surroundings after he witnessed pedestrians walking in the street while clearing snow routes.
“I have seen a lot of people walking out in the streets because that was what was open and wearing dark clothes, so keep an eye out for pedestrians,” he said. “They were very hard to see.”
Crews with the Missouri Department of Transportation are working to clear Interstate 29 of vehicles involved in accidents and trucks that pulled off the road.
Northwest District Maintenance and Traffic Engineer Greg Bolon said an estimated 50 to 80 semi-trucks are on the side of the road between St. Joseph and Iowa.
“We’re trying to get them all off the road so that we can do our work cleaning up the road,” he said.
Bolon said residents who live on lettered routes or low-volume routes should know conditions will be rough for a couple more days as MoDOT prioritizes clearing high-volume interstate routes.
As street maintenance workers continued to clear the roads, Jones asked the public for patience.
We are working diligently to get to those streets that haven’t been done,” he said. “I know people are going to start getting a little bit of cabin fever and wanting to get out.”