On Jan. 5 and Jan. 6, between 8 to 12 inches of snow blanketed Butler County with four 12-hour shifts needed to clear out the historic snowfall. On Jan. 10 and Jan. 11, Hamilton needed two 12-hour shifts to clear out another 3 to 4 inches.
“It’s been a minute since we’ve had storms like we did,” Arthur said. “And we had two of them roll through.”
Hamilton’s attack of the storm was strategic and planned city leaders said in the days before the snow hit.
The city uses 17 trucks on 10 snow plow routes. They run four trucks, two on the east and two on the west sides of the city, making sure to get through all the state routes. They keep two or three plows in reserve in case of mechanical failures with the frontline trucks.
There are also two smaller trucks that clear out narrow streets and city parking lots.
Mayor Pat Moeller commended the city’s public works crew, and said Hamilton is fortunate to not to have experienced problems like others, especially the city of Cincinnati, which had 25% of its snow plows out of commission because of mechanical issues, according to the Journal-News media partner WCPO. In the Cincinnati community of Mount Adams, it took a couple days after the first snowstorm to clear the streets.
“I think you folks totally crushed it,” Moeller to public works leadership team at Wednesday’s City Council meeting. “It didn’t take long before we saw the black asphalt on the street — I thought it would take hours and hours and hours, but you folks did a great job.”
Arthur said he rode along with one of the newer drivers with the city, and said they “were going, at times, 2 to 5 miles per hour because it was unsafe to go any faster than that.”
Residents were able to track the city’s snow removal progress through its Snow Informer App (https://bit.ly/3S3NQ9l), and can log on for the next event, though it’s not expected to see any snow fall until possibly at the end of the month, according to The Weather Channel and WCPO.
About the Author
