(WBBM NEWSRADIO) — The Chicago area is expected to get hit with rain, sleet and snow early Thursday morning. This makes it difficult for road crews to plan ahead, one official said.
“We won't be doing anything in advance, we won't be doing any pretreating,” Chris Snyder, director of the DuPage County Department of Transportation, said Wednesday. “It would just wash off with any of the rain.”
Instead, Snyder said, his department will be keeping a close eye on when the pavement reaches freezing temperatures.
“It's always kind of a balancing act,” he said. “We'll make the decision where that temperature break is going to happen and make sure we're ahead of it and begin to stage our vehicles on the road and begin to salt.”
Snyder tells WBBM Newsradio they’ll have as many as 34 trucks on the road and that the only advantage to this rollercoaster of a storm is that it’s taking place overnight.
“When we're not dealing with traffic, we tend to be a lot more efficient and productive before the morning commute,” he said. “We plow in tandem or triples, so we'll make one pass and cover all lanes and then continue back the other direction and hit our other roadways. So, we’ll have a full response.”
The DuPage County Division of Transportation (DuDOT) oversees roughly 220 miles of arterial highways that serve the more than 940,000 residents.
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