It’s been 329 days since an inch of snow fell on Salt Lake City. While the snow drought has meant trouble for Utah’s water supply and ski resorts, it’s made things a lot easier for the city crews tasked with plowing snow.
Shane Winters, public services director for the city of Provo, oversees the stormwater and streets departments. When it snows, division workers typically plow nine routes of about 100 miles each.
It’s “all hands on deck,” said Winters, who gets plenty of jokes about his last name.
This season, though, crews have only gone out once.
“We didn't have to really do any plowing,” Winters said. “We put some salt, some minor salt down, up on the benches, and that is all we have done this winter.”
That doesn’t mean his crews are idle. Winters said there’s no shortage of maintenance projects. Instead of plowing snow, Provo crews have been cleaning pipes, sweeping streets and fixing and installing signs.
Another consequence of the warm weather is that freeze-thaw cycles haven’t broken up the asphalt as much as in harsh winters, Winters said.
“Because of the dry and actually warm conditions, the amount of potholes that we've experienced throughout the city has substantially diminished.”
With fewer potholes to repair, crews can get an earlier start on spring and summer construction projects, he said.
Another upside to the dry winter is that Provo is spending less money on salt. It’s used much less than the typical winter’s 2,000 to 2,500 tons, though Winters said the budget tends to balance out between heavy and light snow years.
Other cities along the Wasatch Front are spending this dry winter in similar ways.
In Ogden, crews are upgrading parks, striping parking lots and cleaning ditches and the sewer system, according to a statement from the director of operations in public services.
In Salt Lake City, deputy director of public works Julie Crookston said crews are busy with road repairs like sealing road cracks to prevent water from getting in and damaging the asphalt further. Plus, without snow, staff can do more street sweeping.
They are also making sure traffic signals and signs are working properly.
“Our crews are definitely staying very busy, doing a lot of preventative maintenance,” Crookston said.
While they’re not out plowing, snowplow trucks don’t sit idle either. The same trucks are filled with materials to redo roads.
“We just take the plow off the front, do our other maintenance needs, and then put the plow on,” Crookston said.
The money the city saved on salt came in handy in replacing a piece of equipment that broke, she added.
While the weather has been conducive to road repairs, Crookston said it’s too early to say how this low-snow winter will affect the spring and summer construction season. That depends on how the rest of winter and spring turn out. But either way, she said the work happening now is setting the roads up to be in good shape.
“Which then does mean, you know, in the summer construction months, we're not having to maybe fix things that would have broken if there had been a high snow season,” she said.
Macy Lipkin is a Report for America corps member who reports for KUER in northern Utah.
