CINCINNATI — The director of Cincinnati's Department of Public Services said on Tuesday he has been pleased with the city's response thus far to record-setting snowfall across the region.
This week's winter weather brought anywhere from 2 to 5 inches of snow to much of the Tri-State, with CVG seeing a record-breaking amount of snow for the day.
Since early Monday morning, crews in around 80 snowplow trucks, working in 12-hour shifts, have hit the roads in an effort to pretreat, salt and plow city streets.
As of 11 a.m. Tuesday, crews shifted their focus to plowing residential streets, DPS Director Mark Riley said. Around 7 p.m., a new crew will clock in and focus on going back over primary roadways due to the anticipated drop in temperatures.
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"I think we did a great job preparing for the snow. We were very proactive. We pretreated not just the primary roads, but some of the residentials," Riley said. "I think we were actively prepared to make sure that we provide a good service."
As of Tuesday afternoon, Riley said there is no timeline for when all city streets might be cleared.
"We don't know how the roads are in the residentials, because some of the streets are really tight. We don't know if cars have been stopped or because of snow last night," he said. "So, it is hard for us to give you a timetable when we will complete the residential roads."
Riley, who has been at the helm of public services for around six months, was tasked with improving the city's snow cleanup strategy in the wake of its slow response to Winter Storm Blair in January.
"People were upset and angry (in January). Some of that, yes, was due to things that we could certainly pinpoint and improve on," council member Meeka Owens said. "It was a learning moment, which is what triggered (city council), asking the administration, 'Let's take a deep dive here.'"
One of the major improvements announced for this winter season was an upgraded snowplow tracker system. On Monday, it went live for the first time, providing real-time updates to residents as large swaths of Cincinnati's roads were pretreated.
"(The) snowplow tracker worked as intended. It was incredibly helpful for the DPS team as we worked through pretreating all the city streets, which I think really resulted in great conditions this morning," Eric Jamison, director of the office of performance and data analytics, said.
By Tuesday morning, however, the city's tracker didn't always load fully, sometimes showing a black box and other times loading city streets with no available data on snow removal.
The tracker was unavailable for much of Tuesday with a reported server issue. Jamison said increased web traffic on the platform early Tuesday morning overwhelmed the server.
"It's like any new technology implementation," he said. "There are going to be some startup challenges, but we are going to get it back up and running as soon as possible, and we just appreciate everybody's patience."
Work is currently underway on the back end of the server to get it back up and running again, ahead of Cincinnati's next snowfall. A city spokesperson said some sort of notification will be sent out once the issue is fixed.
