Wednesday morning was the first day in quite a few that the city’s chief operating officer, retired Air Force Colonel Ben Jonsson, showed up to work in a suit. All weekend, as snow blanketed the region, he’d been sporting boots and jeans and spent much of each day and night out in the field overseeing snow removal.
If Jonsson, who joined the Spencer administration in May, wasn’t already familiar with the lunacy of the city’s drivers, he got a crash course. “I saw a lot of sedans trying to navigate these big snow drifts, spinning all over the place and getting stuck,” he says. “On Saturday night, people flying down the highway. It’s just insanity. Clearly a lot of them did not make it to their destinations.”
Get a fresh take on the day’s top news
Subscribe to the St. Louis Daily newsletter for a smart, succinct guide to local news from award-winning journalists Sarah Fenske and Ryan Krull.
By Tuesday, 48 hours after the snow stopped falling, the city had opened up its 450 miles of primary, secondary, and hill routes. Just across the street from City Hall, outside the Carnahan Courts Building, an excavator scooped massive banks of shoveled snow into the back of an orange city truck, to be hauled to a city-owned vacant lot. But with minimal snow in the forecast, the bulk of the city’s snow removal is behind it. Back in the safety of his office, Jonsson sat down with SLM to talk about what went right in the battle against a historic snowstorm and what could have been done better.
Prior to the storm, Jonsson says, city trucks dropped 90,000 gallons of brine on city streets on Wednesday and Thursday. (They paused this on Friday as it was so cold it risked freezing.) Then, over the weekend, they put down 31,175 tons of salt. Salt trucks and plows covered 11,500 miles. The city of St. Louis has about 1,100 miles of roadways within its boundaries, meaning that an average piece of asphalt was hit about 10 times.
“We’re saying not every residential street got hit multiple times, but because you had to do all those multiple passes during the snowfall, it really added up,” Jonsson says. “That is a lot of miles.”
Jonsson stressed that municipal employees were working just as hard as they had during snowstorms in the past, but this time around the coordination between the notoriously siloed divisions within City Hall was in better harmony. He noted that Public Safety employees followed behind the Street Department’s plows, identifying spots that were missed and other trouble areas. Drivers who normally pick up trash were driving plows, as were personnel from the Forestry and Parks departments. “That’s the secret sauce,” Jonsson says. “The new administration tried to look and see where we can improve some of the planning, collaboration, and communication.”
It was not all triumph. The National Weather Service crunched some numbers and found that the city hadn’t seen 10 inches of snow and temperatures at 20 below zero since 1982. Police discovered a woman in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood dead in an alley Monday—though the cause of death remains unclear. An autopsy won’t be back for at least two months. Jonsson called her death a tragedy. “We don’t yet know the details of what happened,” he said. “But I urge all in our community to check on neighbors and each other, especially in these dangerous weather conditions, and help get the word out that shelter is available.”
Colonel Ben Jonsson.
The cold this past weekend was at times so severe that salt spinners froze on both city and contracted trucks. The plows were equipped with GPS trackers, but they only showed where the plow was at any given moment, not where it had been. “It’s not Pac-Man. We want Pac-Man. We’re building Pac-Man,” Jonsson says. He also notes that spotters in the field sent in a tremendous amount of up-the-minute data on city streets, but it wasn’t plotted onto a map in real time. All of this information came into the city’s snow command center operating out of the Streets Department building on Hampton, a sort of hub that he says was a big success but at the same time is still in its infancy.
“In my military career, every time you do a major operation, we have a lessons learned, an after action, a hot wash,” says Jonsson.
The free salt distributed by the city on Friday and Saturday will likely be a topic of that hot wash. The program was a hit, running out both days, despite it being decidedly no frills: it consisted of five giant piles of salt outside of fire stations around the city.
The problem, though, was that people from the county, from Illinois, “from all over” availed themselves of the city’s melt, Jonsson says. This included some commercial vehicles coming in and loading up. “That’s not the intent,” he says.“We’re spending taxpayer dollars on that salt, and we want to be good stewards of it.”
Beyond that, in some neighborhoods, residents were vocal on social media about the condition of side streets. Jonsson said that as of around noon yesterday, the city had hit around 75 percent of them at least once—though even that action drew complaints from people whose cars were then snowed in. As of Wednesday, a big gripe for some city commuters is that a number of major thoroughfares like Kingshighway and Vandeventer are down to one lane with a wide buffer of snow on both sides.
“I can’t give you a really good number in terms of widening out all of the primaries all of the way,” Jonsson says. “It’s a work in progress. We’re taking advantage of the sun to help us get that done.”
