Photography by Monica Lazalier Dunlap
Many South City streets are covered with thick ice more than a week of Jan. 5's snowstorm.
As anger over the condition of St. Louis streets 10 days after last week’s snowstorm reached a boiling point, the city rolled out a new game plan: It’s now salting streets that are too narrow for its snowplows, employing a fleet of vehicles from other city departments to do so.
For some residents dealing with streets topped by layers of thick ice, the plan is too little, too late. “I think that the response to this, at least in the 4th Ward, has been an absolute failure,” Alderman Bret Narayan said yesterday at a hearing on the city’s winter weather efforts. He pointed out that he himself was still snowed into his home (he joined by Zoom) and that the mere fact that 104 online attendees showed up at a Public Infrastructure & Utilities Committee hearing was “indicative of the size of the failure here.”
Alderwoman Cara Spencer echoed his concerns, saying the city’s response had been “really frustrating.” “I too cannot drive on my own street,” she said. “There are three inches of ice on it right now.” The public comment portion of the meeting was even more pointed: One resident described the response as a “disaster,” while others described watching cancer patients and elementary school students alike fall on ice-slicked streets. Another told the city to stop talking about how much salt they have on hand if they aren’t going to use it.
Fr. Brent Bowen, a Dominican friar who lives in the 7th Ward, urged the city to revisit its policies: “We can't be the only municipality that has narrow streets and lots of cars.”
Director of Streets Betherny Williams was calm and completely unapologetic in remarks that kicked off the meeting. Hearing her talk, you’d have no idea that the city was lagging far behind other local municipalities in snow clearance—or that ice had been a major problem on many streets for days on end. She even began her presentation by thanking staffers who had “done a good job with arterials and secondaries.”
Williams explained that city workers have scaled back to eight-hour shifts after initially doing 12 hours at a time. She also didn’t seem to have a clear plan to treat the worst areas, saying the department is now assigning streets “per request.” Both comments drew pushback from residents, with some suggesting the city needed to treat the problem with a lot more urgency.
Some called for concerted action on ice. Others questioned the city’s longstanding policy on not plowing side streets so as not to snow in parked cars. Said Bowen, “I think we can all agree the fallout from the current policy is disastrous.” He noted that schools were closed for as long as five days last week, adding, “Businesses are suffering, people are stuck at home. The people who are most impacted are those who are economically disadvantaged.”
Echoing Narayan, residents of Dogtown said the city hasn’t touched hill routes. Meg Geiger described the situation as “terrifying,” saying, “I’m just looking at these other cars like, Here I come.”
A resident of Southwest Garden, identified only as Sarah, said, “My question is, Where are the trucks? I don’t know a single person who’s seen one. How have I not seen a salt truck?”
She added, “I salted my front walk, and it’s completely clear. The salt works. The lack of response is really alarming.”
In her presentation, Williams said it would have been pointless to treat the streets before the storm because it began with rain. She also suggested she’d been proactive in identifying and treating streets near schools.
A poll conducted last weekend by the WashU-affiliated iHeardSTL project found that on a scale of one to ten, St. Louisans rated their satisfaction with recent snow removal at a 3.7. One respondent suggested that if the city isn’t going to salt the streets, they should give some of that salt to neighborhoods who can DIY it.
Narayan pointed out that decades ago the city kept boxes filled with salt at hill routes so that any resident could melt snow and ice without necessarily having to depend on city services.
However, longtime Alderman Joe Vollmer spoke up to explain why those boxes are no longer ongoing concerns. "We used to have those around," he said, explaining they were usually filled with sand. "But when it came time to use them, most of the neighbors had emptied them to use the sand for their personal regards, back in the '70s and '80s."
Narayan replied: "That makes sense."
