Two years since the blizzard of 2015, city workers remember it was tough for Street and Public Works departments to fight the winter weather.
“Our first two days, because there was so much snow and so much wind, we would clear part of a road and it would come right back in,” Mike Gilliland said. “It took a couple of days to get back to what we want to focus on, which is get the hospitals open and the schools open.”
The city works closely with the National Weather Service and Emergency Management Operations to keep an eye on storms headed Lubbock’s way.
Gilliland said they keep hundreds of tons of their sand-salt mixture, ready to spread at icy intersections. The mix is two-parts sand, one-part salt. At one North Lubbock site, they had over 300 tons and were expecting nearly 120 more tons soon.
After the last storm, they wanted to be better prepared. They invested in three new snow plows, for a total of five.
But this equipment does not just sit idle, waiting for the snow to fall. The plows actually are attached to the trucks the Street Department uses every day. The department also used tools like the alley-clearers and dump trucks during the 2015 storm, and even pulled equipment from other city departments, like Parks and Recreation.
He said, that way, they are not wasting tax-payer dollars on whole new trucks, but they have the equipment ready to handle the storms we get from time to time in our city.
He added the attachable plows will be worth it the next time we get hit with a storm.
“When you need them, you want them here. You don’t want to be calling back to the operations center saying, ‘Please does somebody in Abilene have something?’ and then wait for hours for it. You don’t want to do that,” Gilliland said.
Gilliland said the city is even able to help other cities out if they get hit with a wintry blast. They’ll always be sure to keep enough for Lubbock, but when called upon by Emergency Management Operations, like in the case of Hurricane Harvey, they’ll send some of our snow or disaster preps to help fellow Texans.
