On Saturday, Emporia got the ice. The rest of the week, it got the bill.
Compared to western Kansas, of course, Emporia got off cheap. Back there, the feedlots alone are expected to lose between $150 and $200 million on lost cattle weight. But even without a multi-million dollar price tag, the effects here are noticeable.
There’s the canceled basketball game that cost more than $50,000.
Or the $14,000 spent on attempts to clear some of the city streets.
Or even the broken shoulders and minor car accidents that resulted from taking too little caution on too much ice.
It’s even been slow business for some of the shops that repair those cars — at least, until Thursday, when a brief bit of nicer weather brought the customers back out.
“I think they were waiting for it to get warmer,” said John Wheeler, the owner of the auto body shop Floyd’s. “They didn’t want to stand outside showing me the damage any more than I wanted to stand outside and look.”
Floyd’s is a pretty good example of how cold temperatures can freeze a business. Starting Monday, Wheeler had about two customers a day. On Thursday, by contrast, he had eight to 10 by mid-day.
“Most of the ones we’re seeing are people who skidded on the ice or someone skidded into them and took off,” Wheeler said. “That’s a tough one, because most people’s deductibles are high anymore, just to afford the insurance. You tend to cut those people a pretty good break.
“You don’t make much money,” he added, “but you make a lot of friends.”
Some events, meanwhile, went into the deep freeze. A Flinthills Shootout game that had to be canceled for the weather and held elsewhere had a $56,000 economic impact to the city, according to Liz Martell of the Convention and Visitors Bureau. A pair of Emporia State University games that were rescheduled have a potential impact of $102,000 but Martell said she expects the city to get that back when the games are finally played.
“We will recoup that, even with the change, because of the records of the men’s and women’s teams,” Martell said. “We’ve had great crowds, so we should be fine either way.”
Meanwhile, one more good storm could leave the city crews scrambling for dollars. This year, the city budgeted about $21,000 for snow removal materials. This last storm burned up $12,000 of that.
“That says I ate a little over half of that with one outing, so we hope and pray we don’t have any more this year,” said Public Works Director Ron Childers. “I’ve got the rest of the year and December to get through.”
The most expensive of the materials may be the aggregate laid down in place of sand. It’s light and won’t gum up the storm sewers the way sand will. But it also costs $23 a cubic yard.
Another $2,000 was spent on worker overtime for the snow crews, most of it charged on Saturday. There was an attempt to clear some of the ice at 4 a.m. Tuesday, Childers said, a time when few other vehicles are out. It didn’t work well.
“With the temperature so dadgum cold, you can’t get much of it up,” Childers said. “Unless you put the scarifiers down — and that tears up your street.”
Scarifiers are used to loosen or break up a piece of ground or roadway.
When snow or ice hits, the public works department has six people to cover about 160 miles of roadway. So they don’t. Instead, the crews focus on major arteries, hospital routes, and roads around the schools. Even those can be pretty intractable when it gets cold enough.
Thankfully, the city management is a little easier to budge.
“We like to stay within budget, but if we need the material, we’re going to come up with the money to get the material,” Childers said. “They aren’t too critical about that.”
Even with crews out, there was still enough ice on the roads and sidewalks to get someone hurt. Between early Monday and mid-day Thursday, Newman hospital’s emergency room treated four injuries from weather-related car accidents and another 19 orthopedic injuries from slips and falls.
“Most of these were not on Monday.” noted ER director Pam Kvas. “They were on Tuesday when the sun came out. It just made that wet layer on top of the ice and people had been shut up over the weekend, so they gandered out and hurt themselves.”
Most of the patients had shoulder injuries, she said. And no one was immune, from children to the elderly.
Despite the injuries, the emergency room was no busier than usual, Kvas said, so no extra personnel had to be called in. It helped that most people avoided the worst of the weather, she said.
“People tended to stay inside and not get on the street unless they had to, which was helpful,” Kvas said. “It helps that we’re not seeing influenza right now. That could have gotten us in some trouble.”
alficher (anonymous) says...
Is it true that the city didn't want to pay overtime over the weekend to treat our streets. Just to save money.
January 19, 2007 at 7:58 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )