Snow removal: City declares victory, some not so sure

In Denver, Colo., which gets an average of 57 inches of snow each year, the public works department goal is to clear all main streets to pavement 12 hours after the snow stops.

In Champaign, Ill., which gets 23 inches of snow, the mission is to clear primary streets in 12 hours and secondary streets in 24 hours.

After last week's 11-inch snowfall and deep freeze in Central Indiana, the big streets in Fishers were cleared and drivable by 1 p.m. Tuesday. In Noblesville, they were considered passable by 8 p.m. Tuesday.

But in Indianapolis, which doesn't have clear-cut objectives or a timetable for how soon its streets will be cleared, major streets like Meridian, College and 38th Street were still thick with lumpy hunks of snow and ice Wednesday, even into Thursday. Some sidestreets were still sloppy Friday.

And, while city officials insist they did a great job, Sunday's near record snow and historic low temperatures closed bus service for days, schools for a week, cranked up the outrage among residents and stung some businesses that couldn't open.

"Why did they send us back to work Wednesday when the roads were just as bad as they were Monday," wondered Duncan Giles, who works for the Internal Revenue Service downtown. "I have a four-wheel drive and it was like driving on the lunar surface, bumpy with ice and slippery. A 20-minute drive took me 58 minutes Wednesday and 56 minutes Thursday."

The frustration wasn't just about frayed nerves. It was also about keeping the gears turning in Indiana's economy, the nation's 16th-largest by state. The storm undoubtedly presented the city with a mighty obstacle, but some question how well it rose to the challenge of clearing streets for deliveries and commerce.

Social media was burning up with criticism of Mayor Greg Ballard and the city's Public Works Department as many streets remained slippery late into the week. Ballard and his representatives repeatedly pointed out that the 11 inches that fell Sunday was the second-biggest snowfall in history, and the minus-15 temperature Monday morning was the coldest in 20 years.

That, the mayor said, froze the snow in place on the roads and prevented plows from moving it away. Salt didn't work, either, because it was too cold for it to melt the ice pack. The city did all it could given the circumstances, Ballard said, and even after five days of public gripes, the city Friday held firm to its insistence it had done a good job.

"Our mission is safety," said public works Director Lori Miser. "I think we met our goal of getting people back to work as soon as possible. Three factors, snow freezing temperatures and wind, converged on us at once."

But experts in public works say the city's lack of clearly stated objectives makes plow drivers' job assignments murky, and success difficult to measure. Public officials are not held accountable, and it can anger or confuse members of the public, who don't know what level of service to expect.

"If you clearly lay out what your objective is, you give the front-line operators something to go for," said Pat Kennedy, Denver's Public Works director. "It also empowers the department to go to their masters and say, 'Listen, I need this, this and this, if we are to achieve our mission.'"

Many cities contacted by The Star have such goals written into a "mission statement." It helps them measure their performance, they said.

"You should structure your program with the expectation of achieving a level of service a certain number of hours after a storm," said Ben Jordan, program director at the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering and a former public works director in the Chicago suburbs.

"It lets everyone know what to expect and it's all right if it changes through time according to resources,' said Kris Koester, a spokesman for the department of public works in Champaign, Ill., which receives roughly the same annual snowfall as Indianapolis.

Champaign uses 36 plows to clear 719 miles of lanes compared to Indianapolis' 90 trucks and 4,000 miles. So each plow in Indianapolis, a much larger city, must clear twice as much area as Champaign.

Though Champaign's goal is to plow to pavement in 12 hours, it took 48 hours after this week's storm, when 6.3 inches fell, Koester said. With a clear objective, that kind of performance can prompt a discussion of the causes.

But Indianapolis' objective is murky, at best: "To provide prompt coordinated response for effective, efficient and thorough snow and ice control for the safe movement of traffic, public safety and commerce throughout the City of Indianapolis and Marion County."

Miser said the mission doesn't need to be more specific because the size, type and timing of storms varies and it's difficult to predict how long it will take to clear streets.

"Every storm is different."

Experts said there is no industry-wide standard for how many plows or tons of salt a city should have, so comparing cities' public works departments isn't an accurate way to measure their readiness.

Indianapolis has fewer plows per main street lanes than Carmel and Milwaukee, for example, but about the same as Columbus, Ohio, which gets about the same amount of snowfall.

"Every city is different in size, climate, snowfall, service expectation from the public and their budgets," Kennedy said. "Some cities have warmer surface temperatures than others and that will melt snow faster. Others have more sun after a snow."

But every city should have a good contingency plan for abnormal weather.

"You prepare for what's normal but you better be ready for what's not," said Mark DeVries, chair of the American Public Works Association Winter Maintenance committee and the director of the McHenry County, Ill., division of transportation.

Miser said Indianapolis has an adequate number of snow plows, even for a "once in 30 year" snow like last week's. She said city officials had the ability to call in more private trucks with big plows to help clear the thoroughfares, but they didn't need to.

Without a clear objective, however, it's easier to question such calls.

Many Indianapolis residents, among them City-County Council member Zach Adamson, wanted to know why no apparent progress was made removing the snow for the two days residents locked themselves indoors due to travel advisories.

"There were no cars on the road Monday and Tuesday so DPW had the streets all to themselves," said Adamson, a Democrat. "What was the department doing? Did they even go out? My sidewalk was clear because I spent that time shoveling it. My local grocery store's parking lot was clear because they did the same thing."

Zink Distributing, the largest Budweiser distributor in Indiana, grounded its truck fleet Monday and Tuesday due to the snow and frigid temperatures.

But when Wednesday rolled around, company president Jim Zink said he also had thought the city would have cleared the roads Monday and Tuesday when travel advisories were in place. He was surprised to see so much snow on the roads.

"When I came out on Wednesday," he said, "I was really expecting to see the roads be pretty clear and they weren't."

He said his drivers had to travel slowly Wednesday and Thursday, and several trucks got stuck in deep snow. The company is trying to make up for two days of missed deliveries by working through the weekend.

Miser said city trucks continued to plow and salt on Monday and Tuesday.

She said the snow came down at an inch an hour Sunday night, faster than the drivers could keep it plowed — and the subzero weather started the next morning before the salt could melt the snow.

In some neighboring cities with clear-cut goals, however, the ice pack did not appear to present the same problems. In Carmel, the standard goal is to have main and secondary streets cleared down to the pavement within six hours of a snowfall. To accomplish that, the city has 72 plows, and spends about $230,000 a year for snow removal, plus up to $611,000 a year for road salt.

This past week, Carmel's main streets were cleared by 12:30 a.m. Tuesday, said city spokeswoman Melanie Lentz.

Carmel has a detailed plan for snow removal. When there are 3 or more inches of snow, the main and secondary streets are salted and plowed as the snow falls. Cul-de-sacs are plowed when more than 4 inches of snow have accumulated. After most of the snowing or blowing has stopped, another complete of every street is begun. The city said it takes about 24 hours to plow all 460 miles of streets and 1,100 cul-de-sacs.

Deploying more plows in Indianapolis would have a cost, of course. But icy roads bring their own set of costs.

From construction and manufacturing to retailing and banking, Indiana has a huge economy, producing about $267 billion worth of goods and services annually, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. And for a couple of days, its biggest engine, Indianapolis, was all but idle.

How much economic output was wiped out in those days is difficult to say.

Many offices and stores closed Monday, turning downtown into something of a ghost town. Eli Lilly and Co. and Rolls-Royce Corp. closed their Downtown headquarters. Many malls, shopping centers and government buildings also closed for the day.

Restaurants took perhaps the biggest hit, with some closing for two or three days, losing tens of thousands of dollars.

The Front Page Sports Bar & Grill on Massachusetts Avenue, which was closed Monday and Tuesday, lost up to $20,000 in receipts and tips, said John Knapp, general manager.

"Meanwhile, the utilities are still rolling, and the rent still needs to be paid," Knapp said.

Morton's steakhouse closed Sunday and got only nine customers for dinner Monday, said Sherri Elston, the restaurant's sales and marketing manager. The restaurant usually gets 30 to 100 dinner customers. "It's a challenge to make up that business," she said.

With the streets filled with snow, some transportation companies felt a hit.

Indianapolis Yellow Cab, the city's largest taxi company with about 175 cars, was mostly grounded Sunday and Monday. The company uses contract drivers, who went a day or two without pay, aside from occasional calls to help ferry someone to a shelter, hospital or other emergency location, said Tim Neville, operations manager.

Some businesses, however, won't feel the shutdown. People will still continue to buy groceries, pay their mortgage and visit the dentist — even if they had to postpone for a few days.

"Most things can be shifted around," said Justin Ross, professor of economics at Indiana University. "If there's a big storm coming, I'll load up on groceries the day before or the day after."

Even the city's treasured convention business appears to have weathered the storm. The one big convention scheduled last weekend at the Indianapolis Convention Center — United Rentals Inc. annual meeting and show — was able to go on, as most of those attending had arrived in town before the storm, said Leonard Hoops, president of the Indianapolis Convention and Visitors Association.

What's more, some businesses actually saw a big payoff. Plumbers, furnace repair technicians and snowplow drivers kept hopping to stay up with calls. Sales of winter clothing and cold-weather gear is likely to spike. Utilities reported a boost in output.

Ciriello Plumbing was keeping its crew of eight going for 16 hours a day most of the week as hundreds of people called for help with frozen or exploded pipes, said Laura Ciriello-Benedict, company president.

"Even if I had eight or 10 more plumbers, I still couldn't handle all the business," she said.

So, while some businesses were stung, others did fine. On balance, Ross, the IU economist, predicted the net effect to Indiana's economy would be "no more than a rounding error."

So how does the city measure success?

Miser, the city's public works director, said 90 plows have been running round-the-clock since Jan. 1, right before a previous storm dropped 6 inches. Some of the routes are short enough that a driver can go over them up to 10 times during a shift.

The roads were rough Monday, Miser said, "but you could get around."

And, for some, that was enough.

Republican City-County Council member Jack Sandlin defended the city, saying he got many phone calls from people who appreciated the hard work plow drivers were doing under difficult conditions.

"When you have that volume of snow in such a short time, it's a huge challenge," he said. "I think they did a pretty good job."

Still, as the bad driving conditions wore on, the public turned to Twitter and Facebook to disagree with city officials.

Eric Brummett, 33, who works at a health care company on the northwest side, said he had no clue what the city's clean-up operations involve.

"I think there needs to be more transparency about where the plows are going, what routes are the priority," he said. "That way I'd know what to expect."

Brummett said he worked from home for three days and didn't even venture out on the roads. He drove to work Thursday and found the roads passable on the way in but snarled in traffic on the way home when snow began falling again.

"It wasn't like this storm was a surprise, everyone knew it was coming," he said. "The governor and the mayor kept saying beforehand they were prepared for it. But it seems that they weren't."

And that's precisely the reaction public works experts say city officials should avoid.

With every city and climate being a little different, there's always room to debate how much money to spend, and how many plows to deploy.

But it's difficult, they say, to have a debate if the city doesn't first define what success looks like.

Call Star reporter John Tuohy at (317) 444-2762. Follow him on Twitter: @john_tuohy.

Snow removal isn't scraping bottom

Even in ideal conditions snowplows in Indianapolis don't clear the snow to pavement.

That's because, as in many cities, the blades stay an inch above the ground so they don't damage manhole covers. Illinois Department of Transportation plows, on the other hand, do scrape the surface because they don't have the sewers to contend with.

"If it was scraping the ground it could pop those covers right off," Miser said. The city relies on road salt mixed with magnesium chloride to get rid of the last layer of snow. When it's as cold as it was, the salt is not as effective, she said.

"The salt compound works to 25 below, but the colder it is the longer it takes to work."