Cincinnati officials say the response to Monday night's winter storm is much improved compared to the last major storm nearly a year ago — one that some Council members criticized as a "system breakdown" that left some residential streets unplowed for days.
Department of Public Services Director Mark Riley says crews started pretreating streets around 8 a.m. Monday, including some residential areas, then transitioning to snow removal on primary routes overnight. Riley says around 11 a.m. Tuesday, crews shifted to start clearing residential streets.
"This has been outstanding," said Council member Meeka Owens. "We know that we are in a place to move forward. We are making the right investments, and we will continue to do that."
The Department of Public Services already was scheduled for a lengthy presentation on winter weather response in City Council's Climate, Environment and Infrastructure Committee Tuesday morning. Coincidentally, the city saw over four inches of snow Monday night.
The presentation primarily covered the results of an in-depth review of winter weather response, especially during a major storm in early January. Council members grilled then-DPS Director Jerry Wilkerson over residential streets left unplowed days after snow stopped falling.
Interim Assistant City Manager Cathy Bailey led the audit of that storm response. She says the last storm as significant as the one in January was 17 years earlier — and over that time, the Department of Public Services faced significant budget and staffing cuts. Bailey hinted at leadership failures, as well.
"Process, review and improvement efforts have been limited over those 17 years, and technology solutions were, in many cases, not pursued or implemented," Bailey told Council. "I share all that to not point fingers or to blame in any way, but I think it's important for us to just recognize that those things occurred and then left us at a certain state in that department, and that certain state then was not our best way of showing up for winter ops."
Former DPS Director Wilkerson retired in September after seven years leading the department.
City Manager Sheryl Long says she did not ask him to retire; Wilkerson helped with the transition to the department's new director Riley. Riley has worked in public services and water utilities in several Ohio cities, most recently in Reynoldsburg near Columbus.
Snow plow tracker
This is the first snowfall for which the city publicized the new snow plow tracker map. It launched Monday before the first flakes fell, showing which streets were pretreated.
Overnight, the map started showing streets that were salted, plowed, or both — but users soon reported trouble loading the map.
By around 10:30 a.m. Tuesday, the map was gone entirely with this error message: "The public viewer is temporarily under heavy server load and is unavailable. We are working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible."
Here's what the map looked like at about 10:15 a.m.:
Director of the city's Office of Performance and Data Analytics Eric Jamison told WVXU there are challenges with this first rollout of the new technology. He says the OPDA team is actively trouble shooting the server issues due to high traffic.
"This morning, we got exactly, I think, what we hoped for, which was a lot of interest in folks moving to the site," Jamison said. "We've got to figure out how to become more efficient with our servers in order to deliver. We are meeting today, tomorrow, Friday, in order to put those solutions in place."
Jamison told WVXU he also is working with the Department of Public Services to consider simplifying the process for drivers to update the system.
New routes and technology
Riley says DPS worked to optimized snow plow routes ahead of this winter storm.
"Our maps haven't been optimized in over 30 years," Riley said. "With the growth of the city, it was time some of the routes had to be revamped."
Riley says DPS will implement use of drones to monitor road conditions, as well as new "weather stations" with cameras and temperature monitors.
Cincinnati is piloting the weather stations in 10 locations throughout the city. The data will be for internal review only. Riley says the weather stations will be active by Christmas:
- Reading Rd. at Seymour Ave.
- Reading Rd. & MLK Blvd.
- Montgomery Rd. & Ridge Ave.
- River Rd. & Kibby Lane
- Sycamore St. & E. Liberty St.
- Queen City Ave. & Boudinot Ave.
- Victory Pkwy & E. McMillan St.
- Linwood Ave. & Eastern Ave.
- Winton Rd. & N. Bend Rd.
- Colerain Ave. & Kirby Ave.
Snow plow drivers also are using tablets with digital routes instead of the paper routes in binders that were used for decades before this winter.
See the full presentation below:
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