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City Crews Prepare as Winter Storm Heads Our Way

KWGS News

Workers are making their final checks on the City of Tulsa’s fleet of snow plows and salt spreaders before a winter storm rolls in late tomorrow.

Street Maintenance Manager Tim McCorkell said they’ll probably start treating main roads with salt around midnight Thursday, depending on how the storm moves.

"The issue with this storm, what it appears to be is we're going to have a lot of rain first, so it's really hard to pretreat anything for a storm when you're getting that much moisture. It washes it off the roadway," McCorkell said.

The city has about 8,700 tons of salt on hand, with another 2,000 tons on the way.

McCorkell said if this storm is anything like 2007's ice storm, it’ll be all hands on deck.

"It's not only moving stuff off the roadway, it's getting the roads clear of the ice. It's moving the debris to dump sites, so, I mean, it will involve everybody," McCorkell said. "And then, of course, we always have the same issues at the same time. If you have water [main] breaks and such, we're not able to utilize those people because they have their own work."

McCorkell asked for people to stay home during any freezing rain and until crews are able to clear any accumulated ice from main roads. They're responsible for 1,770 lane miles of roads.

Current forecasts call for ice accumulations of a quarter inch or more tomorrow night into Friday, followed by rain through Monday.

Matt Trotter joined KWGS as a reporter in 2013. Before coming to Public Radio Tulsa, he was the investigative producer at KJRH. His freelance work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and on MSNBC and CNN.