St. Louis’ street commissioner says we may be in for a very white winter
By Bryan A. Hollerbach
Photograph by Adam Scott Williams
“My kids are getting older, and they don’t even know what snow is anymore,” remarks Todd Waelterman. The regret in his voice sounds almost comic, given his position. By rights, after all, who should dread winter more than the city’s street commissioner?
Waelterman has served the St. Louis Department of Streets for the past dozen years, most of that time as the head of its street department, whose duties include clearing snow and ice. Like many St. Louisans, he suspects that Old Man Winter will soon blitz the metroplex. “We’re overdue,” says Waelterman. “We haven’t seen a true average winter in, I’d say, five years.”
That doesn’t mean his team has grown complacent. The department has been experimenting with a variety of new tactics for combating the elements—but Waelterman’s still waiting for the chance to put them into practice.
With an unsettling chuckle, he says, “We’re really looking forward to a ‘nice’ winter to see how all this new stuff we’ve done works.”
- The call from Kansas sounds an “all hands” alert for most of the department’s 150 employees, be it to pilot plows in 12-hour shifts or to load salt and lend other support.
- Covering that terrain are roughly 70 plows, 50 to 55 of them running at any one time because of repairs and other factors. Waelterman estimates that normal winters demand 15,000 to 18,000 tons of salt—but St. Louis hasn’t suffered such a winter in a while. “We haven’t used six or eight [thousand tons] in a year in the last five years,” he says. “The past two years, it’s been next to nothing.”
- Waelterman’s department relies on a Kansas firm called Weather or Not to track incoming snowy woes. “They keep us abreast, to the moment, of what’s going on, even spot stuff that pops up in the middle of the night,” he notes. “They give us the wake-up call.”
- Recently, the department has experimented with pretreating a fourth of the city’s roadways with brine before a storm. “You always have this problem of trying to get the salt down before it snows,” Waelterman says. “This allows us to do it—it adds an extra air of public safety out there.”
- The task of clearing the streets demands a large, tough team. Beyond 600 miles of alleys, the Street Department oversees 1,100 miles of roadway—the linear equivalent of a trip from here to Hartford, Conn.
