Road Warrior

The snow record: Problem solved (mostly)

Shortly after I posted the last entry, the National Weather Service re-issued the Daily Climate Report for Toledo for Tuesday. It makes official the 0.8 inch of snow for the day at Toledo Express Airport, bringing the season-to-date to a record 73.5 inches.

What also shows up in the revision is a new precipitation total for the day: 0.06 inch, which is two-hundredths more than shown in the 12:45 a.m. version and also that much more than shown in the hourly weather reports at the airport.

So that's the solution to the issue that prompted me to question how much snow really fell Tuesday evening when the record was broken.

The whole affair doesn't leave me entirely confident in how these records are kept these days, but at least the numbers make sense now.

Toledo's Tuesday snowfall is "missing," and the record is in limbo

And now, the official snowfall for Tuesday, Feb. 26, 2014 at Toledo Express Airport is… missing.

 

So did Toledo set a season snowfall record Tuesday or not?

 

Officially, the National Weather Service now says it didn’t, although in the morning it said enough snow -- 0.4 inch -- had fallen at the airport to tie the 73.1-inch record from 1977-78, and more accumulating snow fell there during the evening.

 

But when I called the regional office in Cleveland at 10 p.m. to inquire how much snowfall the 0.01 inch of precipitation reported at the airport during the previous hour represented in terms of snow, they didn’t know.

 

They said they’d have the spotter at the airport go outside and check.

 

Fifteen minutes later, the response was "another 0.4 inch," which if accurate would have brought the season total to 73.5 inches.

 

But that would have had to be some darned fluffy snow to get four-tenths of an inch of it out of just a hundredth of an inch of water content. Think of it this way: if one goes by the old rule of thumb that it normally takes the same moisture to produce an inch of rain or a foot of snow, one inch of this particular precipitation would produce a whopping 40 inches of snow! (The 0.4 inch in the morning involved 0.03 inch of precip.)

 

So I didn’t buy that, and the folks in Cleveland said, “Well, it’s unofficial” and something more definitive would be posted after midnight, with the Daily Climate Report.

 

But the Daily Climate Report punted. It lists the snowfall for Tuesday as "Missing," and reverted the season-to-date total back to 72.7 inches -- what it was after Monday.

 

This is going to require a little further investigation, but for the time being, I’m going to start by blaming automation.

 

Two decades ago, the National Weather Service had its own staff at the Toledo Express Airport weather station and many other locations that have since been automated.

 

With automation, most of the information coming from the airport is self-reported by thermometers, anemometers, rain gauges, and other instruments. Cloud cover is determined by measuring brightness and sending a light beam up into the sky; if there are clouds below 12,000 feet, the beam bounces back. If the beam doesn’t bounce back but the sky cover is ambiguous, then the National Weather Service reports the weather as “fair,” which basically means only that there’s no precipitation.

 

Automated instruments, however, are very unreliable for measuring snowfall and snow cover. For the latter, the National Weather Service relies on the spotter -- apparently an airport employee who goes outdoors a couple of times a day and sticks a ruler in the ground at a spot or three that one presumes are sheltered from the effects of wind, so that they neither lose nor gain snow because of drifting.

 

New snow is supposed to be measured using a bare surface -- presumably one that is cleaned off after each measurement, and also is relatively immune to wind influence. But the National Weather Service’s backpedal Tuesday night on whether Toledo had even tied the record, much less beaten it, suggests that the readings taken out at Express on Tuesday weren’t reliable for some reason.

 

I'm not going to say the spotter did anything wrong, but I will say I'd have a whole lot more confidence in the measurements if they were being taken by a weather professional. And there’s been some other funny stuff going on with Toledo's snow data this winter, too.

 

There was at least one day out at Express when the snow amount on the ground exceeded the amount that had fallen. How’s that again?

 

And after January, when the crew in Cleveland added that month’s record 40.2-inch Toledo snowfall to the top of the Top 10 list for snowiest Januaries, somehow a bunch of the other Top 10 years’ numbers changed.

 

When I inquired about that latter phenomenon, some of those numbers were changed again, back to figures closer to what they were before, but not entirely. The explanation I got was that there was some sort of data-entry error -- but what data exactly needed to be entered for years long past? It still doesn’t quite make sense.

 

As for the most recent readings, what it would seem to come down to is that the snowfall amounts the National Weather Service officially logs at Toledo Express are fudged a bit -- and that therefore the official records aren’t as solid as one might expect them to be.

The fudge factor isn’t that great, and probably wouldn’t have been noticed at all had it not come into play on a day when a tenth of an inch of snow actually mattered -- at least, it mattered to people who wanted to know if Tuesday was the day that 2013-14 would officially become the snowiest in Toledo’s history.

The dark side of street repairs

It may be harder to get around if you live on an older Toledo street that the city hasn’t gotten plowed to bare pavement during this brutal winter, but there is an up side.

Your water pipe is less likely to freeze.

I’ve learned this one the hard way. Yep, I neglected to leave a faucet running at a trickle during our most recent bout of subzero cold, and one morning last week I woke up to dead faucets.

I hoped the problem might be attributable to one of several nearby water-main breaks, but no such luck. Yes, I’d rather have to boil water for a few days than be totally without for nine days -- and counting.

And several of the city water-division folks who have been over to my house since then have told me the same thing: living on a street the city recently rebuilt, right down to the dirt, and plows reasonably thoroughly is a disadvantage when it comes to keeping my water pipe insulated during extreme cold, especially since the main is on the far side of the street from my home.

When the city’s contractor dug down a foot or more into the ground to remove the old pavement a few summers ago, then laid down a compacted bed of gravel before paving the street anew with asphalt, that had the side effect of reducing the depth of earthen insulation protecting my and my neighbors’ water pipes.

The frost depth in most of the city, the utilities department’s Don Moline told me last week, is down to about 3½ feet, which by rule of thumb is the minimum depth you want for water pipes. But under well-built streets that are generally kept well-plowed, I learned Tuesday, the frost has gotten as deep as five feet -- plenty deep enough to lay a severe chill on pipes.

Scores of people’s pipes froze last week, and the water-division people who visited to diagnose mine told me a lot of them are on recently rebuilt streets. Indeed, they found the problem with my service line was beneath my street, not under my snow-covered front yard or in my amply heated basement.

That layer of fresh gravel beneath the pavement helps the street drain better, which means it should last longer and have fewer potholes in the future. But it also means cold penetrates it faster.

And just as snow on the ground helps protect flower bulbs and other hibernating plants from winter’s chill, so too does it keep the soil beneath a roadway just a little bit warmer than it otherwise would be.

This revelation may be too late to help anyone this winter; after all, the frost line is already deep. But keep this in mind in the future: if your street gets rebuilt down to the dirt, you may want to pay special attention to keeping a little water flowing through your pipes during a deep winter freeze.

Wind chills ain't what they used to be

A friend commented online about how he remembered -70 wind chills during the Midwest's severe winter of 1993-94. “Now that hurt,” he said.

 

This time around, the wind chill in the Toledo area has only gotten down to around -45 or so. One might think it hasn’t been nearly as cold.

 

But before you draw that conclusion, remember that the formula for calculating wind chill was changed early last decade, and the basic result of that was to make wind-chill readings less extreme -- which officials said also would be a more accurate representation of what wind chill is intended to measure: how much colder low temperatures feel on exposed skin when it's also windy out.

 

This National Weather Service page explains the change in more detail. It also has a wind-chill calculator that shows both the old-formula and new-formula wind-chill readings for any given combination of temperature and wind speed.

 

I decided to enter -15 degrees and 25 mph, which is roughly how bad conditions got back on the night of Jan. 6, Toledo’s coldest night so far this winter, into their calculator.

 

The results: -44 under the current formula, and -66 under the old one.

 

So it really has gotten almost as cold in the Toledo area this winter as it did 20 years ago, even if your memory of wind-chill temperatures from back then is that they were much lower.

Pothole calls and unshoveled walks

Last weekend, a couple of calls came in to my voice mail from motorists wishing to report potholes.

Now, I do pass these reports along when I get them, but that may lengthen the delivery time by as much as several days depending on timing. So it’s probably better to call your local municipality, or county engineer’s office, or the Ohio Department of Transportation directly to report your potholes.

 

Toledo’s pothole hotline is 419-936-2867 (936-BUMP), while the Lucas County Engineer’s Office is 419-213-2860 and ODOT in Bowling Green is 419-353-8131. Pertinent phone numbers for most other jurisdictions are readily available on the Internet.

 

ODOT also can be alerted by going here and filling out a pothole report, and there’s also a link on that page to the Ohio Court of Claims, which is where you should go if you want to file a claim for pothole damage against the state. I wouldn’t count on getting much back for a busted tire or bent rim, though, unless you can prove ODOT had been notified about a particular pavement defect and had ample time to do something about it. The same holds for a pothole on a city street or county highway, though those claims should be made in local courts. More likely to succeed is a claim one might make for damage to a private vehicle or mailbox caused by a plow.

Along with the Anthony Wayne Trail, which is the city of Toledo’s problem, I-75 through downtown Toledo is likely to have recurring pothole trouble this winter. At least with that piece of road, drivers can take a bit of comfort knowing that it’s scheduled for reconstruction starting this spring. The lane closings will be a pain in the butt for two construction seasons, but at least it should be bump free for quite a while after that. Rebuilding the Trail, conversely, is still a need in search of funding, and rebuilding it isn’t going to be cheap.

 

I’ve gotten perhaps a half-dozen phone calls, meanwhile, and one postcard written in tiny cursive handwriting complaining about the inadequacy of snow removal last week on various Toledo streets. This is pretty much par for the course any time Toledo gets more than about six inches of snow. Let’s face it, folks: Toledo just isn’t very well equipped to keep up with that much snow, much less more. The city has something like 1,100 lane-miles of streets, and even with “sister division” trucks called out to assist with smaller streets, it just doesn’t have the equipment or manpower to stay ahead of storms like the two we had within six days of each other this month. It doesn’t help when people leave their cars parked on the narrower residential streets, either -- it really does keep plows from getting through in some cases.

 

What I learned last week that astounded me was that the Monroe County Road Commission has even fewer trucks than Toledo does, despite having greater lane-mileage to maintain plus its having contracted for plowing on state highways. Apparently whatever money Monroe County gets from MDOT isn’t enough to pay for a few extra trucks to do that work? Then again, many Monroe County roads are pretty awful year ‘round -- that’s been a recurring theme from that part of Blade Land for the entire 20+ years I’ve been here, and writing stories about it doesn’t seem to have any effect.

 

If money really is being poured down a hole somewhere in Monroe County, I’d love to hear how, but otherwise I can only surmise that there’s something wrong with the road commission’s income stream. Officials’ inability to declare travel bans during a storm like the one early last week doesn’t help matters, either.

 

Clearing sidewalks, meanwhile, is supposed to mainly fall on landowners, but compliance in Toledo is spotty at best, and it doesn’t help that in some places, responsibility is ambiguous. I took a ride along Glendale Avenue on Monday and the sidewalk conditions along nearly the entire length of its eastbound lanes were atrocious. In the residential areas, most of the houses that have frontage along Glendale face various side streets in their subdivisions and are fenced-off from Glendale, so the property owners may not even consider the Glendale sidewalk to be their problem. At a reader’s request after the Jan. 1-2 snowfall, we published the relevant section of the Toledo Municipal Code requiring property owners to clear their portion of the public walk within 24 hours of a storm’s end. But as in the past, there seem to be no consequences for neglect.

 

I also happened to have some idle time along Central Avenue in Sylvania Township and discovered that sidewalk shoveling -- or lack thereof -- is not exclusively a Toledo problem. A colleague says the issue also has come up in Northwood. Frankly, I don’t think I’ve been to any commercial district in the area this winter where anyone seemed to care much about sidewalk conditions -- perhaps because many businesses are tenants, their landlords aren’t present, and so nobody polices how plow contractors simply shove parking-lot snow into huge piles that block sidewalks and foul up visibility for vehicles exiting driveways.

 

Maybe the most disturbing example, though, was this one on Newton Street, right across from Toledo’s main post office. I would think the post office, whose carriers refuse to deliver mail if a walk hasn’t been cleared to the mailbox and who travel sidewalks all the time, would be more conscientious about sidewalk conditions, but apparently whoever plows out the parking lot off Newton isn’t so concerned. This glacier they built on the far side of Newton, completely burying the public sidewalk, will be gone by when, exactly? April?

 

Now, I’ll admit, there aren’t a lot of pedestrians in Toledo. The band Missing Persons once wrote about how “only a nobody walks” in Los Angeles, but that must be doubly so here. But is that a cause or an effect of this neglect for sidewalks? Perhaps a little of both….

'911 - This is Peggy'

A failed attempt to report an unsafe driver in the Cleveland area Tuesday evening was a case study for regional 911 systems to replace municipal call centers.

I was westbound on I-90 approaching the Columbia Road exit in the west Cleveland suburb of Westlake when a white sedan passed me in the exit lane at well over the speed limit and then cut across the ramp split in front of me. The car made several more dangerous lane changes before it disappeared from sight.

Although listening to Toledo’s police radios on a regular basis gives me no confidence that reckless-driver calls routinely result in arrests -- or even tickets -- I tend to make 911 calls in such situations anyway, if for no other purpose than to establish a behavior history for the drivers in case they end up in a collision like the one Thanksgiving night on the Ohio Turnpike.

Making the call even easier for me this time was that the car had a vanity plate, so that information was easy to remember. But getting through to the right police agency proved to be a daunting task.

I don’t know which 911 center initially got my call, but when I described what I was calling about and where I was, I was told I’d be transferred to Rocky River, which I found odd as I thought I had already gone by that community (which a quick map check confirms).

So I went through the same description with Rocky River’s 911, and was promptly told I needed to talk to Westlake. Of course, by the time I got connected to Westlake, I was approaching the next exit, and I hadn’t seen the offending driver for more than a mile. And Westlake told me, based on my current location, that I really should be talking to Avon Lake, the next community to the west, so they told me to hold the line while they transferred me. Again.

Sure, they were doing their jobs, but at this point, all I could think of was that Discover Card commercial in which the exasperated cardholder who wants to talk with the competitor's customer-service supervisor gets transferred all over the boiler room before ending up with the call-taker he started with.

“911. This is Peggy.”

I hung up.

At this point I had no confidence about Mr. White Sedan’s current location, if he was even still on I-90. Should I be talking to Elyria instead? It was no longer worth the trouble.

With a regional 911 center, my report probably would have been handled by the first call-taker, and if a call transfer had been needed, the chance of that being botched would have been much smaller.

Mr. White Sedan, whose license plate I remember two days later, there’s no report on you with any of those police departments -- at least, not from me. Maybe somebody else also thought you were worth reporting and had better lucking calling you in.

In any case, be safe out there, y’hear?

Avoid southbound I-75 in Cincinnati tonight, Saturday

UPDATE: ODOT just announced Friday morning that this work has been postponed because of an impending ice storm. Of course, it might still be wise to avoid driving through Cincinnati tonight because of said storm.

 

Original post:

Heading south beyond Cincinnati on Friday night or Saturday? If so, this will be a good time to use the I-275 bypass around the city instead of taking the shorter route on I-75, because I-75 is likely to be a mess.

The Ohio Department of Transportation is in the midst of a major makeover for I-75 from Mitchell Avenue on south, and this weekend, southbound I-75 traffic will be shifted onto new pavement near the Hopple Street and Western Hills Viaduct interchanges (Exits 3 and 2, respectively).

That means two of four lanes will be closed from 9 p.m. tonight until 6 a.m. Sunday, along with several ramp closings at the two interchanges.

ODOT is urging motorists to use alternate routes, and for through traffic, I-275 is the obvious choice. State Rt. 561 east to I-71 south is another possibility.

That Sunday morning reopening, however, means that if you’re headed to the Cincinnati Bengals game in the afternoon, these particular lane closings should be all done -- just be on the lookout for other drivers who may not be expecting changes in the I-75 layout through the work zone.

Extra lane closings, detours on I-75 and I-475 this weekend

Two weeks after flipping the traffic pattern in the eastbound I-475 work zone, ODOT will be doing the same this weekend on the westbound side.

From 10 p.m. today until 5 a.m. Saturday, the northbound I-75 exit to westbound I-475 will be closed, with traffic detoured via the Phillips interchange. Once that reopens, the southbound I-75 exit to westbound I-475 will be closed until about 1 p.m. Sunday, with traffic detoured via the Detroit interchange.

During this entire time, westbound I-475 will be down to one lane from I-475 to Monroe, and the ProMedica Parkway westbound entrance will be closed.

If you’re visiting downtown Toledo for the Farmers’ Market or whatever other purpose on Saturday or Sunday morning, surface streets like Monroe or Sylvania Avenue might be a better choice to get home. This is especially true if you use the Douglas exit, which will be closed intermittently for paving.

Also from 10 tonight until 5 a.m. Saturday, northbound I-75 will be down to one lane after Dorr Street for sign replacement, with complete closings of up to 15 minutes scattered throughout that period. Through traffic should use State Rt. 795 or Miami, Oak, and Front streets to get to northbound I-280 to avoid possible delay.

Just in case that's not enough, the exit from northbound I-75 to northbound I-475/U.S. 23 in Perrysburg also will be closed Saturday. ODOT is taking soil samples from the ramp embankment and the drilling equipment blocks the entire roadway. Use I-75 north to U.S. 20/23 and then return to I-475 on the southbound side.

Keep your wheels straight while waiting to turn left

The fatal crash Tuesday on Central Avenue at Herr Road in Sylvania Township is far from the first time I’ve heard of motorists being hit from behind and pushed into oncoming traffic. I vividly remember the first, on Connecticut Route 66 just east of Portland, Conn., more than 20 years ago when I was a cub reporter with a newspaper in a nearby city.

I don’t recall anyone getting killed that time, but the driver who got pushed was seriously injured. And that has been the usual minimum outcome any time I have covered or heard of such a crash since then, because such crashes are usually close to head-on.

Such crashes vividly illustrate the lesson from a driving instructor who told my driver’s ed class in high school that when waiting to make a left turn, keep your steering wheel straight until you’re ready to go. That way, if you get hit from behind, you’ll be pushed forward instead of into oncoming traffic. And there’s always oncoming traffic when that happens -- otherwise, why were you waiting?

My father never got  that lesson, apparently, because not only did he angle his steering wheel toward the left when waiting to turn, he developed the even more dangerous habit of slowly creeping into the turn, often crossing the center line, under the theory that it would allow him to turn faster once an opportunity presented itself and might even induce an opposing motorist to stop and let him go first.

Funny, I don’t remember anyone ever obliging him in the latter respect. He didn’t accept driving advice from his kids, either. Fortunately, he also never got hit.

But it’s a lesson that bears repeating. Whatever minimal time advantage one might get out of setting up for a left turn is vastly overwhelmed by the tragic consequences of getting rear-ended in that position.

Crash shines light on wrong-way bicycling

When I was young, I was taught that when walking along a road with no sidewalks, I should walk on the side facing traffic. I presume this was to give me the ability to get out of the way if something went sideways with a driver and to be aware, in general, of traffic.

Unfortunately, some people appear to have gotten this same advice for riding bicycles, and it just isn’t the same.

Bicyclists who ride on the left shoulder scare the heck out of me as a driver, in part because of the potential for crashes like this one in Perrysburg Township on Thursday to happen. But a wrong-way cyclist doesn't have to fall onto the road first to be a hazard.

When a car driver is out on the road and comes up behind a cyclist, proper driving requires treating that cyclist like any other vehicle: slow down, if necessary, until a safe passing opportunity arises.

But when one encounters a wrong-way cyclist and there’s also oncoming traffic in the other lane, what exactly is a driver supposed to do? With closing traffic on both sides, it may not be possible to slow down enough to avoid a tragedy, and in that case, the obvious choice is to hit the bicycle rather than collide head-on with another car.

It doesn’t help that many rural roads in northwest Ohio lack shoulders wide enough for cyclists to use. But those are the roads where wrong-way cycling is most dangerous, and they aren’t likely to get shoulders any time soon.

Yes, there are bad drivers out there who carry the attitude that bikes should be on the sidewalk, or just go away entirely. They’re wrong. Bicycles have every right to the road that cars do.

But for cyclists, that means obeying the same rules of the road. Keep to the right. Always.