News

No, the Carolina Panthers did not take our snowplows

By Wednesday afternoon, NCDOT snowplows had cleared main roads and nearly all secondary roads but some roads remained snowy.

By Bill Moss, Published: January 27, 2016

Five days after the big snow, rumors about plowing roads flew more furiously than the snow itself.

The governor (or someone in authority) ordered five Henderson County-based snowplows to Charlotte to clear roads for the Carolina Panthers’ NFC championship game on Sunday.
The NCDOT maintenance crew in Henderson County had five snowplows out of commission.
No, it was the snowplow operators. Five drivers walked off the job.
A salt barn collapsed, blocking crews from loading brine to treat the roads.
The truth was as slippery as Pinnacle Mountain Road on Friday night.
Most of the chatter going around town was false and the parts that were true — trucks out of commission and a shed collapse — had a minimal effect on the snow clearing operation, officials said. Plowing took six days because the area had a big snow — snowfall amounts ranged from 12 to 16 inches — and it takes a long time to clear hundreds of miles of primary and secondary roads.

Panthers need help

Calls poured in to the county courthouse, city hall and state legislators.
“I’ve been told that there were five trucks that ended up down at the Carolina Panthers game, and I’ve also heard that the shed that was used to house the salt treatment collapsed in part,” state Rep. Chuck McGrady said just before 2 o’clock Wednesday afternoon.
The number 5 kept coming up. Five trucks were dispatched to Charlotte to clear roads so the high and mighty could watch Cam Newton and the Panthers demolish the Cardinals and punch their ticket to the Super Bowl. Five trucks broke down. Five drivers quit. The only true part of the number of 5 was Panther fans slapping palms in the stands and the saloons.
“Some of the roads are hard to get to, off the beaten path,” McGrady said. “In that case I can understand. The other thing is you’ve got state roads and you’ve got private roads, and I used Grady Hawkins’ subdivision as an example (Sugar Hollow, where McGrady himself lived before he moved to Creekside). The state road runs through the middle of that subdivision and some of the cul de sacs are state maintained and some of them aren’t. So people can’t figure out why did my neighbor’s road get plowed and mine didn’t.”

Trucks stayed here

In North Carolina, the DOT, and not counties, is responsible for roads, major and minor, except for private subdivisions, which make their own arrangements or do without. If a subdivision developer builds roads to state specifications, the DOT will agree to take them over.
“We’re making good progress today,” Roger Ayers, the county maintenance engineer for the NCDOT said just before 3 p.m. Wednesday. “We’re down to the low end” of clearing all roads. “We’re still working on the south side” in Green River, Flat Rock and Upward. “We probably lack 10 percent” of the secondary roads.
The county had 12 snowplows on heavy trucks and five motor graders, he said.
He had heard the rumor about the Carolina Panthers.
“We’ve not sent any of our trucks anywhere” outside the county, he said.
In fact, according to McGrady, “just the opposite was true. The state sent equipment from Macon and Cherokee counties” to Henderson County.
As for the talk about drivers walking off the job, Ayers also knocked that down.
“In the past year I’ve had one retire and three quit to go on to other jobs,” he said. None were recent or snow-related.
One rumor was actually true. “We had a salt barn roof that collapsed but that’s not had anything to do with the time frame for clearing the snow,” Ayers said.
Green told McGrady that the roof at the rear of the barn collapsed. Crews could still get to the salt and load up trucks.
After riding the roads on Wednesday, Assistant Schools Superintendent Bo Caldwell reported on conditions to Superintendent David Jones. The school system made the decision to hold school Thursday on a two-hour delay, the first time in a week that schools are open.
“We’re not going to put buses on roads that are icy,” Caldwell said. “We’re always going to err on the side of safety. Over the last couple of days we just felt like we couldn’t put buses and, this is important, teenage drivers on them. It’s not safe for buses and not safe for kids driving.”
Caldwell, too, had heard the swirl of rumors.
“We’re hearing that there’s delays,” he said. “There’s chatter that they had all this equipment break down. There’s chatter that five or six people walked off the job. There’s chatter that the salt barn fell in.”
McGrady reached NCDOT division engineer Ed Green.
“I went through the rumor mill with him,” McGrady said about two hours after first speaking to the Lightning about the snowstorm. “With respect to the shed over the salt it did collapse but he said it had no effect on the job. It was the back end of the shed. He said they had four trucks down. Two were older trucks and two were newer trucks under warranty. There was no set of employee issues.”
The nature of the storm, which dumped snow steadily from about 1 a.m. Friday to late Friday night or early Saturday, made it hard for snowplows to keep up.
“It came down for some period of time and people kept driving on the roads and that made the problem more difficult,” he said.
Like Ayers, Green confirmed that the maintenance operation had turnover. McGrady quoted answering a question about the rumored walkout: “Nobody’s quit in the middle of this thing if that’s what you’re asking.”