The city is getting ready for an ice storm on Sunday night into Monday.
Mayor Jean Stothert held a press conference Friday afternoon to discuss the cities plan of attack in preparing for the ice storm.
“Please stay home if you can,” said Stothert, “Our primary focus will be transportation, power, and of course safety.”
The city started pre-treating the roads Friday afternoon and will cover all 5,000 lane miles of road in Omaha.
Stothert said it is all hands on deck when it comes to manpower.
“Even though this will hit on a three day holiday for many, we are fully staffed and will implement some new strategies to respond,” she said.
The ice storm will be different than a normal snow storm, “With ice and freezing rain, it's everywhere immediately and is slippery at once,” said Street Maintenance Engineer Austin Rowser.
Rowser said they are using a brine solution which lowers the freezing point of water. They will switch over to salt as soon as freezing precipitation hits the pavement. 112 city trucks and about two dozen private contractors will be part of blitz.
“One of the changes we are making, and that will be of benefit to us in this storm is, we will utilize contract resources to apply salt on the roadways,” said Rowser.
The fire department will also make sure they are able to respond to emergency calls.
Fire Chief Dan Olsen said they will have chains on the truck wheels and have four wheel drive vehicles ready to go at a moment’s notice.
“We will all be on call, we will be prepared to deploy and assist if a medic unit were to become stuck, not able to respond to a driveway, we will often times go on foot. We will make it to your call and provide that service that you need,” said Olsen.
The key theme from the press conference was stay home if you can.
To keep up with the latest on the storm, keep checking with KMTV online and in our broadcasts.
