Excessive snow creates difficulties in Libby

Mail carriers can’t get to mailboxes, firefighters can’t get to fire hydrants and residents can’t get their cars out of the driveway – it must be winter.

Snow management is not a new concept for the area, but when the snow is dumped all at once, it poses unique challenges for residents and local governments.

The sheriff’s office and police department are busy with snow-related incidents – cars stuck in snow berms, people violating snow ordinances and neighbors squabbling over whose snow is on whose property – while city and county road crews have been working overtime to clear the roads between storms.

“It’s just the timing of the storms,” said Corky Pape, Libby city maintenance supervisor, explaining why the roads have, at times, not been cleared out. “They’re hitting late in the afternoon and in the wee hours of the morning.”

The city road crew starts plowing Libby’s business district at 2 a.m. Plowing in residential streets that run north and south begins at 4 a.m. and streets that run east and west at 8 a.m.

It’s difficult to plow outside the set schedule because a winter parking ordinance frees up those specific streets at those times. If the snow comes down hard in the afternoon, Pape will send the crew out, but only to create a thin lane for vehicles to pass through.

Lincoln County has faced the same problem.

“If it starts snowing at noon, we’re probably not going out until the next day,” said Tony Berget, county commissioner. “It takes four times as long to plow during the day when people are out.”

Berget wants the county to implement an official five-level road priority list:

• In-town hills.

• School bus routes.

• Well-traveled roads.

• One- or two-family traveled roads.

• Roads that are on the county’s inventory but don’t necessarily have to be plowed.

“People call dispatch and say, ‘It’s slick here, we need sand,’” said Berget. “When the roads get that bad, we know, we are getting to those roads, but we have a priority list.”

In addition to the snow that residents have to shovel from their driveways, the plows leave an extra berm that can range from a few inches to a few feet tall.

Jim May, a Libby resident, addressed the city council last year after the city used a snow blower to widen streets while blanketing residential sidewalks and driveways.

“These are two snow years in a row,” May said. “It’s unusual and we run out of places to put it.”

May recognizes that the road crews are “just doing their job,” but believes the city should recognize residents’ point-of-view.

“I want to work with the city to find some sort of compromise,” May said. “The city needs to eventually pick up some of the snow.”

Occasionally, city and county road crews use a wing plow to avoid snowing-in residential driveways, but it’s time-consuming and when there’s so much snow, it’s nearly impossible, according to Berget and Pape.

“With this amount of snow and this lack of manpower, we’re not able to do it right now,” Pape said. “We take it on a case-by-case basis. If it’s an elderly person, based on the circumstance, we can get back to help them.”

Berget warns residents not to throw the snow back onto the road.

“It’s illegal,” he said, “and unsafe.”