'Happy to be home': Twin Cities residents confront heavy snow, slick streets
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In downtown Minneapolis cars and buses moved through the streets with ease, after plow drivers spent hours clearing the pavement and pushing the snow into mounds, some taller than six feet, to be trucked off later. Soon workers in small tractors with spinning brushes got busy on the sidewalks.
Winter weather continued to blanket a wide swath of Minnesota in heavy wet snow Wednesday as a two-part storm system lumbers across the region. Fourteen inches fell in the southwestern Minnesota town of Edgerton.
And snow gauges around the Twin Cities are reporting more than a foot. Travel is treacherous, and many Minnesota students woke up to another day of school delays and cancellations.
With temperatures hovering just above freezing, the precipitation fell as light rain, turning the snow already on the ground into slush.
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The few pedestrians downtown enjoyed the climate-controlled comfort of the skyways. But Jeffrey Fortson walked along Nicollet Mall.
“I actually prefer this over the skyways. The streets are a little quicker. But it hasn’t been too bad. If it was worse than this, I would just go to the skyway,” Fortson said.
Fortson, a North Loop winery manager, said telecommuting wasn’t an option, so he used a rideshare service and the bus to get around. Both have been reliable, but required some extra time and planning.
It wasn’t quite that easy for Amazon driver Carlos Edmonds in north Minneapolis. Edmonds started work at 6:30 a.m. but got called off four hours later. Edmonds said he’s glad to be back with his family, and not having to negotiate slick, snow-piled streets.
“If you come to a complete stop, you will find yourself stuck like the UPS guy,” Edmonds said of another driver nearby. “He has a bigger truck and he got stuck and now he’s trying to walk a package to a house. I don’t want to be in that condition, so I’m just happy to be home.”
For others, the weather is more than an inconvenience, it’s a matter of life and death. Michael Trullinger oversees ambulance crews as a battalion chief for Hennepin EMS. He says most of the snow emergency routes have been passable, but some ambulances have gotten stuck — particularly on unplowed side streets.
Trullinger said crews are prepared for these eventualities; they keep a salt-sand mixture in the ambulances as well as a shovel.
“In one instance I know the crew split, and while the one paramedic was attending to the patient in their house, the other paramedic was out freeing the ambulance up.”
Minneapolis, St. Paul, and many other communities have declared snow emergencies, putting parking restrictions into place so plow drivers can clear the streets.
Lisa Hiebert with St. Paul Public Works said the department had time to plan for this storm, so they called up extra crews Tuesday night to get a head start on the arterial roads.
Even though the snowfall was heavy, Hiebert says St. Paul waited until the following day to declare a snow emergency.
“The snow kept coming and it was continuous throughout the night and this morning, so we would have had to stay on those arterial streets to replow them. We would not have been able to get into our residential streets any earlier with a snow emergency than having declared today,” Hiebert said.
The snow is expected to continue through tonight. Forecasters say most areas of central and southern Minnesota will see another 1 to 3 inches by tomorrow morning.
Peter Cox, Michelle Wiley, and Feven Gerezgiher contributed reporting to this story.