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Depending on what part of town you live in, it may have taken city snowplowing crews a little longer than that 72-hour target to hit all of Anchorage's sprawling neighborhoods on the first really challenging weekend of the year.
"We had a snowstorm on Wednesday, slash, early Thursday," the guy in charge of getting snow off city-maintained streets said Wednesday at a news conference hosted by Mayor Dan Sullivan. "It was a light, fluffy snow." Then the problems started. Maintenance and operations director Alan Czajkowski said the normal complement of snowplows and crews turned out. Sullivan's steep 2009 budget cuts haven't hurt the department's ability to put equipment on streets, Czajkowski said. First they cleared the heavier traveled roads -- arterials and collectors. Then Friday morning, the plows started moving into neighborhoods on the west side of town. (The city's approach to plowing snow does a flip-flop every time it snows. One time, crews start on the west side and move east, and the next snowfall they start on the east and move west. That means nobody is always last, although people in Midtown are always second. Makes sense unless you live in Midtown.) But before crews finished plowing all the neighborhoods, it started snowing all over again. "Those of you who were out shopping (on Black Friday after Thanksgiving) realize that at about 8 o'clock in the morning ... a real wet, heavy snow" started again, Czajkowski said. "That, coupled with the first snowfall, made it anywhere between 10 and 14 inches depending whether it was on the Hillside ... South Anchorage. "So that did present some problems." The second snow dump meant plowing crews had to stop clearing neighborhoods and go back to clearing more heavily used collectors and arterials -- a 12-to-15-hour process. By the time they finished the major roads again, some neighborhoods that hadn't been serviced in the first go-round had snow piled up past their hubcaps. In some places, Czajkowski said, "we were trying to move somewhere between 11 and 14 inches. "That wet snow and rain made it pretty tough to move. We kept all the crews busy until we finished, but it just took a little bit longer than we would have liked, and we surpassed our 72-hour goal." There were a couple of people out sick and some equipment issues, and cars left parked on the streets can slow down snowplows more than one might think, Czajkowski said. "By the time we got back into the neighborhoods, it was Saturday morning, so a lot of people felt like they didn't see a plow on their streets for several days," he said. "We worked around the clock as always, we had everybody that was available out there. We worked around the clock, night and day shift. We did everything we could to make it happen." Most likely, Czajkowski and his people will get another chance soon.