snow

Snow and ice removal was an arduous process in Washington County Wednesday as the area received a mix of snow and freezing rain Tuesday night.

KCII and the Washington Municipal Airport both measured 6.5 inches of snow, and the National Weather Service Quad Cities Office states that the highest freezing rain accumulations were along the State Highway 34 corridor from Fairfield to Illinois. The Washington County Communications Center received over 30 calls for vehicles stuck on roadways, ditches, or medians.

County Engineer Jacob Thorius says the secondary roads employees worked from about 1-6 p.m. Tuesday and were back on the roads at 5 a.m., making paved routes drivable before noon Wednesday. Thorius describes how the maintenance has been, “This one’s a little more challenging with that ice packing that snow down and the freezing rain just compacting everything. It’s been harder to pop off the road, I just noticed that even my own driveway when I was working on that earlier this morning that it’s hard to do, and some of our pickups that we send out to help on intersections or some of the small unincorporated towns like Rubio or Richmond have not had good luck there. They’ve not been able to bite down into that snow because of that ice on top and so it’s making the removal process slower than normal.”

Thorius estimates that the gravel county routes won’t be all cleared until the end of Thursday. Like with any winter storm, he asks residents to be patient while the secondary roads department clears the roads and to be sure to give the plow trucks and graders enough room when driving on the road.