Snow continues to pile up

At 6 a.m. today, the head of Fremont’s street department was already looking ahead, and he didn’t like what he saw.

“It looks like we could be doing this a couple of times in the next few days,” said Mark Vyhlidal, superintendent of public services.

He is referring to running the city’s regiment of snow plows, graders and sanders for several hours over night and during the day.

Street crews were called out around 5:30 p.m. Thursday to start laying a mixture of sand, salt, liquid calcium and calcium pellets. The crew was called out shortly after freezing rain started to fall in the city, Vyhlidal said. The crew stayed out until 11 p.m.

During that time the freezing rain changed to sleet before finally changing to snow, which ended around 3 a.m., he said.

“We had the full crew back out at 2:30 a.m. today, and they’ll be going until we’re done. Luckily, this one didn’t hang around like the last one. It snowed and was gone.”

The city is under a snow emergency until 6 p.m. today, which requires that vehicles not be parked on the street of any of the city’s snow emergency routes.

National Weather Service meteorologist David Eastlack said this storm moved very quickly through the area, still leaving a significant amount of snowfall behind it.

The accumulation was significant enough that all area schools were canceled today. Statements were released by school officials in the Fremont, Arlington, North Bend, Scribner-Snyder, Logan View , Dodge, Archbishop Bergan and Trinity Lutheran school systems.

Tribune weather spotters reported snowfall in the area ranging from 2 inches in Fremont, Arlington and North Bend; 6 inches in Hooper; 3 inches in Wahoo and Oakland.

Eastlack said the snowfall totals could have been worse but were reduced because the speed the system went through.

But he said the worst weather-related issue this weekend won’t be precipitation. It will be the cold.

“We have a pretty significant arctic blast behind this,” he said. “We will see temperatures rapidly decreasing this weekend. Temperatures will decrease during the day Saturday, and by Sunday will struggle to get into the single digits for high temperatures.”

Even though the forecast for Saturday calls for a 50 percent chance of snow, he said it won’t amount to much if it does snow.

The high temperature Saturday is expected to be about 15, the official National Weather Service forecast stated. But then will fall during the day with winds at 15 to 25 mph, hitting wind chills as low as -15 degrees.

The low temperature Saturday night is expected to be -5 degrees, but 25 to 30 mph winds could make it feel more like -30 degrees.

Sunday’s forecast calls for a high temperature of 1 degree with 10 to 25 mph winds, making it feel more like -25.

But the frigid temperatures won’t be around too long before high temperatures rebound Tuesday when the high is expected to be around 20 degrees.

Part of the issue this weekend is the fresh snow, Eastlack said.

“Fresh snowfall won’t allow temperatures to rebound very much,” he said. “With the winds, this weekend is going to be brutal.”

But Vyhlidal said it isn’t the cold temperatures so much that has his crew on alert.

“We’ll be keeping an eye on the weather Saturday to see what needs to be done,” he said. “We might have to look at Tuesday, too. We don’t know just yet. We’re just in that pattern right now where we get one snowfall after another. It makes it harder on us. The guys put in a lot of hours.”