Almost the entire crew of Ball State University's Facilities Planning and Management spent Thursday night plowing streets during Muncie's second major snow this season.
About 22 out of 26 workers also plowed parking lots and cleared sidewalks and steps to keep them as accessible as possible for students. The workers used at least six plows.
"Students will have to be patient with us," Michael Planton, associate director of Landscape Services, said. "We try as hard as we can to get it out of the way for you."
Crew members, who typically work a shift of 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., planned to work until 10 p.m. Thursday night, clearing the way for drivers and pedestrians. Services were expected to resume around 2 a.m. or 3 a.m., Planton said.
A heavy snow warning remained in effect for most of East Central Indiana until 4 a.m. today. Six to 8 inches of snow were expected by storm's end, with locally higher amounts possible, according to the National Weather Service.
All interstates, main roads and secondary roads in central Indiana were snow-covered and slick, and many slide-offs were reported, James LaMar of the operations center at the Indiana State Police said.
"The roads are slick, and the drivers made them hazardous," LaMar said.
Facilities Planning and Management bought at least one new heavy plastic plow for the university this year, which has softer plastic edges and can be used on sidewalks and on McKinley Avenue's brickwork. The university will still use its metal-edged plows, which are particularly effective on parking lots and campus streets.
The Muncie City Street Department handles clearing streets as long as the snowfall reaches less than four inches, Doug Brown, street superintendent of Muncie, said. After four inches, the Muncie Sanitation Department is responsible for the city roads.
The city's primary roads include Wheeling, University and Tillotson avenues. The secondary roads include Riverside and Oakwood avenues, Brown said.
Brown said the city planned to use 11 plows and 20 tons of salt Thursday night. The use of salt would cost the city between $9,000 and $10,000, he said.
The city would not increase the number of workers to handle the road conditions, Brown said.
"We don't have the ability to fluctuate manpower we need based on our budget," he said. "If you add manpower, you have to add equipment along with it."
Despite Thursday's major snow, the National Weather Service said this winter has a higher-than-normal chance of having above-normal temperatures.
"The best bet is that it will be warmer than normal this winter, but that is not a certainty," John Kwiatkowski, science and operations officer for the National Weather Service in Indianapolis, said.
Looking at the average temperatures for the entire period of December to February, a colder-than-normal winter is expected this year, David Arnold, associate professor in the Department of Geography, said.
"This is going to be a cold winter," he said. The National Weather Service has "forecasted a much-warmer-than-normal winter, but this is not happening."
Locally, weather has indeed been colder than normal since mid-November, Arnold said.
Despite conflicting expectations for the rest of the season, students and local residents should remember they cannot be too prepared for winter weather.
"Even with a warm winter, you're still going to have some severe winter weather mixed in there," Arnold said.
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