The city street department proceeded along well-worn tracks Thursday morning after an overnight snowfall covered much of the work night crews had done hours earlier.
"We're having to redo a lot of what we did last night," said Denny McPhate, Hot Springs' public works director. The snow "came down hard last night, apparently."
Sand and salt deposited over Central, Malvern and Grand avenues Wednesday night were under a blanket of snow early Thursday that day crews began removing at 7 a.m., exposing an underlying accumulation of ice and sleet that had presaged the snow's arrival.
"There's a big layer of ice under the snow," McPhate said. "Once all the snow is bladed off, it's a matter of starting the melting process of the ice."
McPhate said sand left in the plow trucks' wake added traction to street surfaces that sun unimpeded by clouds had improved throughout the morning. Crews were clearing streets connecting residential areas to the city's most-trafficked routes by mid morning, running plow trucks down Ridgeway Street and Lakeshore Drive.
"It's starting to slush in spots," McPhate said around 9:30 a.m. "The longer (the sun) stays out, the quicker it will start melting."
County Road Commissioner Tony Breshears said unfiltered sunlight was steadily reducing ice and snow on county roads to slush by Thursday morning, preparing the pavement for graders to ply frequently traveled areas such as Marion Anderson Road west of Lake Hamilton.
Breashears said crews were waiting on the sun to do its work before running the graders, which he said are ill-suited to overcoming substantial ice deposits. The force needed to break the ice can damage county roads, he said, and compromise traction.
"Once it turns slushy, then you can move it," he said, explaining that temperatures forecast in the teens for early Friday would refreeze slush left on roadways.
"You have to push down on the blade so hard that you tear up the asphalt. You put too much pressure on it and the back tires just spin, because the rear end gets too light."
Breshears said a grader was also sent to Morphew Road east of Marion Anderson and Walkway Drive, which loops west of Marion Anderson.
"The asphalt's attracting heat from the sun," Breshears said. "We'll have this stuff pretty much cleared off by the end of the day."
County crews were also dispatched to northern and eastern parts of the county, with a grader working on Glazypeau Road off Highway 7 north and Spring Street in eastern Garland County. Breshears said residential roads were addressed after those with greater traffic volume. Resources were directed to the former based on calls received by the road department, Breshears said.
The http://www.Idrivearkansas.com webpage, tracking road conditions along the Arkansas Primary Highway Network, lagged behind real time conditions. Updated throughout the day by the Arkansas State Highway and Transportation Department, its early afternoon report designated highways inside the county as snow-covered.
The midafternoon update showed Highway 270 west and east as mostly clear from the Montgomery County Line to the Hot Spring County Line and Highway 70 west as mostly clear from Hot Springs to the Montgomery-Pike County line.
McPhate said day crews seized on the lull between Wednesday's heavy rainfall and sleet to pretreat some areas with salt around 6 p.m.
Lt. Ricky Middleton of the Hot Springs Village Police Department said street crews there waited for precipitation to accumulate before putting out salt and sand along high volume routes such as DeSoto Boulevard and Balearic and Barcelona roads.
"It doesn't do a lot of good to do that until after the event is over, then you can put it on top of the road and get good traction," he said.
Middleton said secondary roads threading the closed community's more than 20,000 wooded acres were still treacherous Thursday morning and wouldn't be reached by street crews until primary roads had been cleared.
"If folks don't have to travel, they shouldn't," he said. "Let the sun beat down on (the roads) a while. That will help as much as anything."
Local on 03/06/2015