ALLEGHENY COUNTY, Pa. — Crews across the area are preparing for the winter storm moving into our area.
Snow will begin to move in from the south by Wednesday afternoon. By the evening commute, untreated surfaces will be covered by snow. Expect reduced visibility in areas of heavy snow.
The Pittsburgh area could see 4 to 7 inches of snow with higher amounts of greater than 7 inches in the warning areas to the east.
Allegheny County
The Public Works Department will deploy 26 salt trucks with plows starting at 7 a.m. on Wednesday.
The county said drivers will be kept over the end of their shifts to provide extra coverage until the snow stops and the roads are clear.
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City of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh’s Department of Public Works said crews will begin treating streets with blue-tinted magnesium chloride tomorrow morning, and then will continue treating and plowing through the storm.
The DPW plans to have 75 trucks on the 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. daylight shift tomorrow, and extend crews through the afternoon shift from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m, when there will be 69 trucks available. Night crews will work from 10 p.m. through 7 a.m. Thursday.
Westmoreland County
The salt supply is good in Unity Township. The trucks are fully equipped and ready to go.
Unity is one of Westmoreland county’s biggest townships, so there’s a lot of ground cover.
“We actually have 161 miles of roads; our township is 69 square miles. We have a lot of residential developments and a lot of our farm country roads,” said Unity Township supervisory Mike O’Barto
He expects the biggest challenge of this storm will be the timing.
“It’ll be a little easier tomorrow because there will not be any school buses on the road, but there are people going to work and coming home from work and we want to make sure they can drive safely on all of our roads,” O’Barto said.
We checked in with PennDOT too. Crews will be out in 12-hour shifts, and they’re out pretreating today.
Unity Township said they used 300 tons of salt just two weeks ago, but expect to use even more come tomorrow.
“But right now behind me we have at least 2500 tons of salt so we’re ready to go and I hope for god’s sake we don’t use 2500 tons tomorrow,” O’Barto said.
And this is the first winter the township is spending a full winter inside their new building with a full fleet.
Trucks after an arson devastated it three years ago.
State Preps
Gov. Tom Wolf signed a proclamation of disaster emergency ahead of Wednesday’s storm.
“Currently, models predict that the first significant winter storm in nearly a year will hit Pennsylvania tomorrow,” Wolf said “The commonwealth’s emergency preparedness teams have spent a great deal of time and energy over the last several months supporting efforts to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic and help the commonwealth weather this public health emergency and ensure vaccines are delivered as planned. This proclamation makes it easier for all of those involved in vaccine delivery and keeping people safe to do their jobs.”
The proclamation covers the following local counties: Allegheny, Armstrong, Butler, Fayette, Greene, Indiana, Jefferson, Washington and Westmoreland.
The governor’s office said PennDOT and the Pennsylvania Turnpike will be announcing speed and travel restrictions.
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