The City of Spokane made changes to its snow removal plan following the first real test of the plan over the last couple of weeks.
Changes to the plan include:
• Adding residential hill routes to the Stage 1 Snow Emergency. Under a Stage 1 Snow Emergency, the City already plows all primary and secondary arterials, fixed STA bus routes, the central business district, neighborhood business districts, and the medical district on the lower South Hill. Residential hill routes are those routes numbered in the 20s on the residential snow plow route map, and include Five Mile, part of Indian Trail, the Eagle Ridge area, and other parts of the South Hill.
• Deploying graders in residential areas for Stage 2 Snow Emergencies, if conditions warrant. When starting on residential plowing, the Street Department will test the effectiveness of using truck plows. If the truck plows cannot remove snow to 0 to 2 inches of material, the department will use graders or grader/truck plow teams to plow in the residential areas.
• Eliminating berms from downtown streets at the conclusion of a full-City plow. Once a full-City plow is complete, Street crews will be deployed to melt or remove berms from the downtown core. They will continue this work as long as other storms don’t require they focus once again on plowing streets.
The updated Snow Plan can be found here. And one more thing: there’s a fake Twitter page claiming to be a City snow plowing site. To get information on the City’s snow removal efforts, the City’s Twitter account can be found here.