Knox County declared a disaster

City still digging out from Friday's snow

Wednesday, December 6, 2006

By JANE CARLSON

The Register-Mail

GALESBURG - Gov. Rod Blagojevich declared Knox County and 48 other counties state disaster areas Tuesday as communities continue cleaning up after last week's storm dropped record or near-record snowfall across a large portion of the state.

Galesburg Fire Chief and Emergency Management Agency Coordinator John Cratty said the declaration means there may be money available for local agencies that have had additional expenses due to the storm.

Cratty said the biggest cost for local municipalities has been overtime related to snow removal. He will submit information to the Illinois Emergency Management Agency this week and find out at a later date whether reimbursement funds will be available for local agencies.

This is the first time Knox County has been declared a state disaster area since Cratty became EMA Coordinator in 1998.

"We had a snow emergency declared in the late 1990s," Cratty said.

"But I can't think of another time we would have been declared a disaster area."

Cratty said the local American Red Cross chapter also may be eligible for reimbursement, due to the organization's role in getting food and supplies to motorists stranded for many hours on Friday at the Spoon River Rest Area, 13 miles east of Galesburg on Interstate 74.

Five days and 1,800 truckloads of snow later, the city of Galesburg is still digging out from Friday's snowfall.

"I think we've been maybe a little spoiled, we meaning the citizenry of Galesburg, by 2-inch, 4-inch, 6-inch snows that we can get cleared up in eight to 10 hours," said Public Works Director Larry Cox.

Cox said 25 city workers have been clearing streets around the clock since 1 a.m. Friday. He hadn't yet calculated overtime, but said before the storm there was about $13,000 remaining in the street division's $27,000 overtime fund.

"We're still under budget," Cox said, attributing the remaining money to a mild winter during the fiscal year that began Jan. 1, 2006.

The crews have been moving the snow from city streets to the street division property and to the former Finley Road at the intersection of Linwood Road and Fremont Street.

For the next couple days, crews will be cleaning out intersections and pushing the snow back to street curbs.

"There will be some snow pushed at the end of (residents') driveways and there's just no other way around that without doubling our work force, which is not an option," Cox said.

He said the crews will have to work around the cars parked in the streets.

The Galesburg Police Department has issued 34 tickets for cars parked in restricted areas during a snow emergency.

Today, the department will begin checking on vehicles to see if they've been parked in the same spot for more than 72 hours, an ordinance violation.

If so, tickets will be issued and the cars will be towed, said Capt. Lindsay May.

"They need to know to get their vehicles off the street," May said. "The street department has to get (to) those areas."

As for other operations, the post office has caught up with mail delivery.

Mail trucks from Peoria are now arriving on-time to the Galesburg post office and carriers worked until just after 7 p.m. Monday to deliver all backed-up mail, said Postmaster Patricia Kollberg.

"We wanted to get those checks out ... we had first of the month checks," Kollberg said. "We're anxiously wanting to serve our customers and get everything back to normal as far as consistency of delivery."