1st big snow in a while calls for Wayne County debriefing; talks center on travel warnings
Wayne County commissioners were debriefed on the county’s first major winter storm of the year — and, in commissioner Jeff Plasterer’s memory, the largest in the last few years.
The purpose of the discussion, Plasterer said, was to talk to Wayne County Emergency Communications and Management Director Matthew Cain and Wayne County Highway Department Supervisor Mike Sharp to find out how well he and fellow commissioners Brad Dwenger and Aaron Roberts handled the storm and what they could have done differently.
“The three of us being new to the process, or relatively new, with the first major storm of the last few years really hitting us kind of right out of the gate, we just wanted to get together and talk through how things went from your perspective,” Plasterer said to Cain and Sharp.
Why wasn’t Wayne County upgraded to a Level 3 Travel Warning?
Very little traffic is seen on Richmond’s South 8th Street Monday morning, Jan. 6, 2025, as Wayne County was placed under a Level II Travel Watch, deeming county roads only to be used for essential travel.
A common topic throughout the debriefing was the public’s complaints about the Level 2 Travel Watch not being upgraded to a Level 3 Travel Warning.
“No matter what we do, it’s always wrong in someone’s opinion,” Cain said. “We received a lot of criticism that we didn’t go to a travel warning or the Level 3, but if you read the ordinance and the way it’s written, we were nowhere close to a Level 3.”
Cain provided each commissioner and media member, including the Palladium-Item, with copies of the county ordinance passed in 2003 defining each level.
In the ordinance, the terminology “crippling emergency event” did not define the road conditions seen last weekend to warrant a Level 3 upgrade, Cain said.
“I know we’ve been on Level 3 before,” Sharp said. “Level 3 is normally when I can’t get my trucks up and down the road.”
Cain also told commissioners that the ordinance only applies to county roads and has nothing to do with interstates or state roads.
Sharp said he didn’t like the aspect of the interlocal agreement with the city of Richmond and town of Centerville regarding issuing travel alerts, referring back to a Valentine’s Day winter storm one year that put the county on a Level 3 Travel Warning despite Richmond’s roads being in fairly good condition.
“People think you’re crazy because they’re on Level 3 when they shouldn’t be and we’ve had that discussion before, but that’s Richmond’s decision,” Sharp said.
The ordinance defining each alert level says that a Level 1 Travel Advisory is done without the involvement of county commissioners and is instead decided collectively by the Wayne County sheriff, superintendent of the Wayne County Highway Department and the director of Wayne County Emergency Management, while commissioners determine whether to upgrade it.
Plasterer said he had conversations during a discussion over the alert levels with Richmond Mayor Ron Oler but did not yet have a chance to talk to anyone in Centerville. Cain said he also had never had any conversations with Centerville officials on the topic.
County attorney Ron Cross asked Cain for further clarification regarding the alerts made by the county or each community and whether it is possible that Centerville, Richmond and Wayne County could all be under different levels.
“When I report to the state and people look at the state travel advisory map, I can’t break it down per community,” Cain said. “It’s all or none. That’s one reason I’m sure it was done that way, to eliminate confusion. There absolutely would be one-off situations where maybe it’s not justified for one but it is for another, but we just never know.”
More than 70 calls made to emergency services during storm
South C Street in Richmond, similar to other city side streets, was still covered with snow and ice late Tuesday morning, Jan. 7, 2025. Wayne County Emergency Management, collectively with the Wayne County Highway Department, county commissioners and the city of Richmond, downgraded the area’s Level II Travel Watch to a Level I Travel Advisory.
In a 36-hour period starting at noon Monday, Wayne County Emergency Communications received 74 calls related to the storm: 24 slide-offs, 21 property damage, 16 disabled vehicles, six requests for personal assistance and five traffic hazards, according to a document Cain provided to the Palladium-Item.
Cain said he, Sharp and county Sheriff Randy Retter involve commissioners to discuss a level upgrade based off how many calls he receives into dispatch, as well as other factors.
“You have a snapshot of a 36-hour window, what I would call the bulk of our snowstorm,” Cain said. “How many slide-offs? How many disabled vehicles? How many property damage accidents? Then I break it down as to how many were in the city of Richmond and how many are on the interstate, because I can’t really count what’s on the interstate as based on what the county does with their level.
“I kind of look at the numbers coming into the 911 center, almost in real time on Sunday afternoon, I was watching how many accidents and I report that then to Mike, who uses that along with the information he’s seeing. Then we bring in the sheriff to get his opinion on what his deputies on the road or reporting. So that’s kind of how that decision is made.”
Cain said the exact number of calls or category of calls received and documented isn’t entirely accurate, however, as Dwenger said the first slide-off call listed was his and that it wasn’t a slide-off, but instead his vehicle wouldn’t start and needed a tow.
“These numbers aren’t perfect, because that really had nothing to do with the snow event, but the dispatchers categorized that as a disabled vehicle, and so therefore it captured on my report,” Cain said. “So, it’s not foolproof.”
Highway department day crew worked hard to keep roads cleared
East Main Street in Richmond is cleared of snow late Tuesday morning, Jan. 7, 2025. Wayne County Emergency Management, collectively with the Wayne County Highway Department, county commissioners and the city of Richmond, downgraded the area’s Level II Travel Watch to a Level I Travel Advisory.
One of Sharp’s biggest concerns during the storm for his department wasn’t how many inches of snow that the county was going to receive, but instead the winds causing snow drifts that made clearing the roads more difficult.
“I didn’t call the day crew in because it was going to snow most of the day and the wind was supposed to blow all day long,” Sharp said of when the snow began to fall heavily Monday afternoon. “We really didn’t start down until 5:30 when I called the day crew in, and we had 21 trucks out at that point in time. We were still banging our head against the wall, but we were making some progress, per se, as far as helping people get through and getting down the roads. It takes awhile when we get snow like that.”
Sharp added that every road in the county was plowed twice during the day, with two trucks continuing to plow them throughout the night while assisting with emergencies.
“Overall, I thought it went smoothly with how we set it up,” Dwenger said of the county’s response. “Communication was great and I thought it worked out.”
When Plasterer asked Sharp about the potential of snow coming back to the area Friday, Sharp said that although he thinks it’s going to stay south of Wayne County and he won’t put a full crew on the roads, he isn’t going to ignore the possibility of accidents and other calls.
“After you go through a storm like this, a lot of the traffic is used to snow now,” he said. “You get an inch of snow, we’re not going to just jump out there and sit out there and wait for it to get that inch of snow, and then just try to get it all right away.”
