A warning has been issued for a winter storm starting Thursday, February, 21, 2013. The storm is hours away, but the preparations are already underway. The heavy snow fall will be hard on drivers, which is why Public Works is in action.
"Working on the trucks, preparing equipment, stock piling salt, making sure that we are ready for preparations for the snow to come in tomorrow,” says Doug House, Municipal Services General Manager for Moline.
He says this enables Public Works to be ready when the snow starts coming down, "It takes a lot of time to get salt moved and we treated it today with chemicals. There’s a lot of preparations done to each individual truck, making sure the blades are adequate on the plows themselves."
The work doesn’t stop there either; tomorrow there will be even more.
"It's going to be a very busy day, our guys are going to be working non-stop , very quick breaks and back out on the road,” says Doug.
Both Moline and Davenport’s Public Works employees will be working 12 hour shifts.
"We've been here before, we know what to do, so here we go,” says Davenport Public Works Director, Michael Clarke.
He’s hoping to salt the streets beforehand if rain isn’t added to the mix, "If we're able to pretreat the streets and initiate snow melting before the plows even arrive, that's going to give us an edge on getting streets cleared."
No matter what Mother Nature throws at them, Doug says they will be prepared, "When the snow gets here we will start as soon as it starts snowing we'll be out and we'll be ready."