Kansas City’s road conditions are thawing, coffee shops are reopening and some parents are finally getting to send their children back to school after a five-day bout of cabin fever.
But you might want to keep your shovel and snow melt handy, because this may not be the last severe winter storm of the season. Kansas City International Airport recorded 11 inches of snow on Sunday, marking the fourth-largest single-day snowfall since the area’s records began being tracked in 1888.
Gary Lezak, a meteorologist and the founder of Weather 20/20, said his Lezak Recurring Cycle model shows this weather pattern will return every six weeks, possibly resulting in similar storms in mid-February and at the end of March.
For most people, a major snowstorm means stocking up on groceries, keeping a stack of blankets handy and maybe even a surprise day at home from work or school. But the Kansas City area’s weather response agencies have been working around the clock to clear up major highways, sidewalks and local road conditions to make sure major infrastructure can remain functional.
Now that the snow is finally clearing, those agencies are looking back at what worked well and what to change for next time.
Kansas City Hall’s ice storm gamble
The first snowflakes may have fallen on Saturday night, but this weekend’s storm started a few hours earlier with a dangerous ice storm glazing major highways and slowing traffic to a crawl.
Kansas City, Missouri, tried to get ahead of the ice.
City Hall began pretreating all of its roads on Friday morning with magnesium chloride, a snow melt that’s effective at lower temperatures. When the freezing rain began 36 hours later, it fell onto salty roads that didn’t get the chance to freeze over, as it would on roads that weren’t pretreated.
“The second the freezing rain started to fall, the highways turned to sheets of ice, and we had hundreds of crashes,” said City Manager Brian Platt. “Yet the city streets were in great condition … We had running water, wet pavement, drivable, safe conditions for the most part.”
The road conditions are by no means clear yet, and some residential streets are still packed with snow. But plowing Kansas City’s streets is a monumental task — City Hall is responsible for 6,400 lane miles. That’s far more than smaller surrounding suburbs such as Roeland Park or Grandview.
Platt said the weekend storm offered a case study in two different approaches to managing the road conditions by the Missouri Department of Transportation, which maintains interstates and highways, versus City Hall, which maintains smaller roads like Broadway Boulevard, Troost Avenue and Wornall Road.
Wilf Nixon, the technical director for engineering and technology at the American Public Works Association, said that pretreating roads does something critical for the storm later on. It prevents snow from bonding to the pavement.
“If the bond is broken, I can plow it off the road,” Nixon said. “The road is pretty much bare and wet afterwards. If it’s frozen to the road, I’m going to get some of it off, but there’s going to be a layer of snow and ice left behind.”
In a situation like this weekend where freezing rain is bonded to the road and then coated with a pile of snow, the decision not to pretreat can make it even more difficult to plow the snow on top.
The trouble is, cars can kick up the pretreatment, and if there’s any liquid rain before the freezing rain and snow, the pretreatment can wash away. That’s thousands of tons of snow melt and brine flushed down the storm drain before it can do its job.
That’s why MoDOT chose not to pretreat its 34,000 lane miles across the state as aggressively as Kansas City did. The department did salt and brine the roads the day of the storm, but not a day and half in advance like Kansas City.
“Maybe a storm is coming in, and it’s rain at first and then it changes to snow,” said Matt Killion, MoDOT’s assistant district engineer in Kansas City. “If you pretreat, the rain is going to wash away your treatment before it can do any good. So it’s a waste of material to basically treat ahead in that type of situation.”
Platt is glad that City Hall acted aggressively for this storm.
“We knew the temperatures were going to be cold, and we knew that any kind of precipitation would allow for some kind of icy condition,” he said. “Why risk it? We didn’t risk it, and it paid off for us.”
When do you close the road?
This weekend’s storm also led to interstates across both Kansas and Missouri being shut down, forcing travelers to stop or move onto side streets and frontage roads.
As frustrating as it might be for drivers, Nixon said at some times it could be best to deliberately shut down a highway, even if it’s somewhat drivable.
“If we are having a severe storm, eventually the road closes itself,” he said. “Eventually a semi jackknifes, and that closes your interstate pretty darn quick … Are you better off closing the interstate deliberately before that happens?”
It’s not a decision that agencies take lightly. For one, it frustrates a lot of drivers — some of whom may be doctors and nurses headed out to a shift at the hospital or utility workers on their way to make emergency repairs.
There’s also the trouble of where to temporarily store the semi trucks or cattle carriers when they’re taken off of the road.
But at the same time, if a highway is closed and the department of transportation doesn’t have to worry about jackknifed trucks or stranded cars, it can focus on clearing the snow more quickly to safely reopen it a few hours later.
“We’re not meant to talk about planning to fail,” Nixon said. “My job is to keep the road open and the traffic flowing. If I close the road, I fail. But if I don’t close the road, it closes anyway, and I fail anyway.”
Preparing for the next storm
Not so long ago, it would have been unimaginable to forecast a severe storm even a week in advance.
But forecasting has evolved. Today, new predictive models can predict severe weather, to some degree, even months in advance.
Lezak, the meteorologist, said that Kansas Citians should get ready for more severe weather in February and in the springtime.
He studies the long-range cycles of weather patterns. He said the weather tends to repeat itself about every six weeks. That means the atmospheric conditions from this past weekend will show up again in mid-February and again at the end of March.
“You might not know for sure that it’s coming until three days before,” he said. “But if you can plan three months ahead, six months ahead, it’s accurate enough. It does provide that ample warning.”
To be sure, there is some margin for error. It may not materialize in exactly the same way — as a major ice, sleet and snow storm across the Midwest. It could happen a little farther north, or it could be more snow than ice or more sleet than snow.
But broadly speaking, Lezak hopes people can take the long-range forecast and plan ahead when it comes to travel, home and car repairs or stocking up on snow melt.
“Weather forecasting is getting better,” he said. “And we just have to have a playbook that you go by.”
Click here to see the map on Kansas City’s website.
Click here to see a map of traffic conditions on Kansas and Missouri highways.
This story was originally published by the Beacon, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective.
