Warm weather is giving city street managers in Utah County an opportunity to assess how back-to-back storms wreaked havoc on their winter storm budgets, salt reserves, equipment and crews.

According to T.J. Warnick, street superintendent in American Fork, “It’s been hard to keep up and get to the smaller streets,” he said. The warm weather is giving them time to clear those roads.

Warnick said the city has had issues with trucks breaking down during storms as well. Because American Fork doesn’t have a salt storage facility it has a small stockpile on hand and has had to receive salt deliveries this week. “We’ve thrown about 150 to 200 tons of salt,” Warnick said. American Fork has six full-size trucks and four small trucks.

In Lehi crews have plowed nearly 3,000 miles of streets. Street superintendent Wade Allred said, “We’ve used 1,500 tons of salt just this week, with a full fleet of 12 vehicles each averaging 200 plus miles.”

He added, “Fortunately we only plowed three times last year. We have 2,000 tons of stockpiled salt. Budgetwise we’re very strong. We’ve only gone through about 25 percent of our storm budget.” Allred said plow crews averaged 15 hours of overtime with this week’s storms and plowed 430 miles.

In Orem, city spokesman Cameron Boyle said crews put in 370 man-hours. That includes 15 trucks with plows and sanders. “Already this season our street crew has used 2,500 tons of salt, cleared 19,000 lane miles and worked 1,700 man-hours,” Boyle said. “In comparison, in 2012 the city only used a total of 500 tons of salt, cleared 3,766 lane miles and worked 370 man-hours.”

Orem budgeted $75,000 for salt and has spent at $88,750, plus $59,200 for equipment and $34,000 in wages, for a total of $181,950 on snow removal. “Finances are tight within the city, but snow removal is an essential service,” Boyle said. “Public works will continue to provide the service for the remainder of the snow season, which could last for another month and a half. Citizens can go to the website to find a priority map for snow removal.” Visit www.orem.org/index.php/streets/snow-removal.

State roads in Provo and Orem such as University Parkway, State Street, Geneva Road and Orem’s 800 North are maintained by the Utah Department of Transportation.

According to Provo public works director Dave Decker, the whole winter season has been hard. “We’ve doubled our salt budget of about $35,000 for the season, which began in November,” he said.

Rob Nesbit, Provo’s streets manager concurred. “We are way over our salt budget,” he said. “If it continues with this type of snowfall, it could be a problem.”

Since Tuesday Provo has used 332 tons of salt and plowed 610 miles of road. That has meant long hours and difficult working conditions for employees. According to Nesbit, plow crews have put in more than 454 hours of plowing, just this week.

Spanish Fork has 138 center lane miles of roads to maintain, according to James Chappel, streets division manager. “We have 10 snow plow operators for five trucks; each employee averages 20 hours of overtime per storm,” he said.

So far this year crews have put down 1,620 tons of salt with a budget of $50,000 for the year just in salt. Chappel said that one of things they get hit hard with is replacing the plowing blades, since these storms have kept the blades going much more than normal. “We are on our third set of blades on each truck, with the average cost of changing blades being $2,800 per truck for each change,” Chappel said.

Like other cities Spanish Fork is watching its salt budget closely as winter storms can still cause problems for another two months.

The biggest issue cities had with recent storms was just keeping up. The snow came down much faster than plows could clean and keep it clean. “We can’t be effective until it stops snowing,” Springville street superintendent Jason Riding said. “It’s really hard to catch up.”

This week Springville put 180 tons of salt on 2,500 miles of road. They also helped UDOT with State Street. The eight-person crew put in 400 hours of plowing time.

All of the storms come at a cost, and for Springville it meant using up its storm budget for the year. “We exhausted our budget of $25,000. We are about $27,000 with potential of more storms to come,” Riding said.

With the sun out for a while and the streets clean, Riding and other street managers are looking at the next winter problem. “Now we’re trying to fill the potholes,” Riding said.