Dane County saw its first significant snowfall of the season Wednesday, Nov. 20 into Thursday, Nov. 21.
City of Madison Streets Superintendent Charles Romines said Madison was prepared to respond to snowfall.
“We are always prepared by early November for the chance that we’ll need to respond,” Romines said. “We’ve had trucks set up for snow and ice for about two to three weeks now and we made sure we have our salt deliveries in, that was set up and ready to go earlier this month.”
For this snowfall, Madison had supervisors — one from each side of town — come in at 4 a.m. Wednesday morning to watch the weather radar and road cameras to limit the chance of being caught off guard.
The crew that runs the snow and ice trucks were then brought in between 4:30 a.m. and 5 a.m., Romines said.
At 5 a.m. Madison began their spot treatment. This removal method is used when there isn’t enough snow to plow and the covering of snow is nonuniform.
“Our bridge decks and some of the roads on the outskirts of town, where it gets colder faster, we spot treated those with a little bit of salt as well as some of our more significant hills in town,” Romines said.
Following this spot treatment came a full round of salt between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. Thursday morning, Romines said. This method kept the roads slushy and wet instead of icy.
The roads are warm early on into the season, which prevents rainfall from freezing into ice.
In recent years, Wisconsin has seen more of these freezing rain events than ever before, Romines said. Typically these events would only occur in November and March, when snowfall is more likely to devolve into rain.
But for the last three or four years, this hasn’t been the case. It is whether this is a short-term trend or a result of climate change, Romines said.
Madison has two kinds of responses to snow and ice, Romines said.
“If there’s three inches or less of snow fall, we do what’s called the city salt routes, that’s about half of the city roads,” Romines said. “Those are your main roads, roads with hospitals, schools, police and fire stations, thoroughfares, that type of thing.”
The other half of roads are residential and neighborhood streets, which only get plowed and salted when there are more than three inches of snowfall, Romines said.
But, in the last six years, these roads have been salted by the city under special circumstances.
“The reason was we had a little bit of snow pack on [the roads] and then we were forecasted to get freezing rain,” Romines said. “The concern we had was, with that snow pack on there, then you get freezing rain, it would almost act like a Zamboni on an ice rink.”
These roads were predicted to get extremely slick, so the city spread low rates of salt to heat up the snowpack and give the rain a rougher surface to fall on, Romines said.
This is a process Madison will need to become comfortable with carrying out in the future if more freezing rain events occur in the middle of winter, as opposed to traditional snow, Romines said.
Madison experienced a major snowfall event last January, in which there was 10 to 12 inches of snowfall followed by eight straight days of temperatures below 12 degrees, Romines said.
The kind of salt typically used in snow procedures, rock salt, only works at temperatures down to about 19 or 20 degrees, Romines said.
To combat this, Madison is employing a different kind of salt, magnesium chloride — which melts snow down to eight or nine degrees.
Though, magnesium chloride is about 30-40% more expensive than rock salt and more corrosive to metal which can be damaging to cars, buses and infrastructure, Romines said.
During the first significant snows of the year, people often forget safe driving protocol, Romines said.
“Drive slower, break earlier and give people space,” Romines said. “It takes longer to start and to stop. The last thing I would say is clean your mirrors.”
