City urges people to stay off roads
A pedestrian walks down snow-covered Poplar Ave., on Thursday, Feb. 18, 2021. This week’s weather has created dangerous driving conditions today, Jan. 18, 2024, and a city leader is encouraging people to stay off the roads. (Mark Weber/The Daily Memphian file)
This week’s weather has created dangerous driving conditions today, Jan. 18, and a city leader is encouraging people to stay off the roads.
The blanket of snow that’s covered the ground all week started melting Wednesday, Jan. 17, in the afternoon sunshine. Then, freezing rain started falling over Shelby County Thursday morning.
Temperatures will rise just above freezing Thursday afternoon, before dropping back down below freezing and staying there through the weekend. The drizzle of rain coating the ground is expected to freeze over, leaving black ice in its wake.
Memphis Public Works Director Robert Knecht said people should stay off the roads because ice accumulation will make it difficult for the city to continue clearing streets Thursday.
The city started applying salt and brine to bridges, underpasses and major thoroughfares last Saturday, the day before the storm started.
Knecht said public works has used all available equipment, including some from the city’s Solid Waste Division. The city has added four more plow trucks to its 13 already-contracted trucks and 12 city-owned trucks, he said.
The city salted and brined the roads it worked to plow on Wednesday, but Knecht said the city was limited in how much salting or brining it could do on the streets that were clear.
“We’re not a northern city,” Knecht said. “We don’t have that level of plows and equipment of a city that sees this kind of snow far more frequently or on a regular basis in the winter.”
In northern climates that see heavy snowfall, it is common for large cities and even small municipalities to be able to clear the roads after one weather event and then salt or brine the roads again ahead of more precipitation, helping roads stay clearer of ice.
The city’s relative sprawl also makes the job harder. Memphis is much larger geographically than many major cities in the north. It’s roughly fives times the geographic size of Boston, and almost three times the combined size of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota.
Shelby County remains under a winter weather advisory until Thursday evening, and dangerous road conditions are expected to linger.
Topics
Memphis Public Works Division Robert Knecht winter weatherSamuel Hardiman
Samuel Hardiman is an enterprise and investigative reporter who focuses on local government and politics. He began his journalism career at the Tulsa World in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he covered business and, later, K-12 education. Hardiman came to Memphis in 2018 to join the Memphis Business Journal, covering government and economic development. He then served as the Memphis Commercial Appeal’s city hall reporter and later joined The Daily Memphian in 2023. His current work focuses on Elon Musk’s xAI, regional energy needs and how Memphis and Shelby County government spend taxpayer dollars.
Keely Brewer
Keely Brewer is a Report for America corps member covering environmental impacts on communities of color in Memphis. She is working in partnership with the Ag & Water Desk, a sustainable reporting network aimed at telling water and agriculture stories across the Mississippi River Basin.
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