A seemingly innocuous snowfall under two inches once again brought the city of Omaha to a crawl Friday morning. 20 minute commutes turned into two hour ordeals. And it's not like today was just bad luck; it's happened multiple times over the last few years.
Around here, Nebraskans used to joke how just a little bit of snow would bring a southern city like Atlanta to it's knees. We'd always say that we knew how to deal with snow; we're used to it. We're prepared for it.
But not anymore. Or at least, the city of Omaha isn't.
It didn't use to be this way...but it is now. After this keeps happening over and over and over again, Mayor Stothert's excuses that since the snow hit at rush hour, there was nothing the city could do.
Except there was something the City could have done...and that's pretreat the roads. Bellevue did that last night, and reportedly didn't have near the issues that Omahans did. Bellevue officials said they did that in two hours.
Omaha officials say it takes 30 hours to do it. And apparently, since they only had about a ten hour window to work with to pretreat the roads, they decided against it. There are two problems with that decision:
First, if it takes 30 hours to pretreat the roads in Omaha, Omaha doesn't have enough equipment for pretreating. If Mother Nature hadn't intervened to melt this snow, nobody would have accepted waiting 30 hours to get sand and salt trucks out to areas of town.
Second, even if you couldn't pretreat ALL of the roads overnight, you could have pretreated the main routes overnight. It wouldn't take many trucks to make a pass over I-80, I-480 and I-680, as well as Dodge, Maple, Center and L Street.
You can argue that this costs money...which is true, except that NOT treating the streets costs money too. How many businesses lost productivity because their employees were stranded in traffic? How many vehicles were damaged in collisions? And what about the Omaha police officer who slipped and fell, ending up in the emergency room?
It didn't used to be this way. A snowfall like this used to turn a 20 minute commute into a 30 or 40 minute commute. Not 120 minutes, like today. And it's not the first time the city, under Mayor Stothert, has failed in handling a relatively minor snowfall.
And frankly, unless something changes at City Hall, this won't be the last.
