Snow cleanup is underway. Now in Altoona, most of the roads and parking lots are clear and in good shape. On some of the narrow side roads, however, there’s still work that needs to be done.
“It could always be worse,” said Altoona resident Jayme Walter. “I’m just… I’m thankful this was it though.”
With the snow still piled up, the street Walter lives on looks like a one-way street, but it’s not.
“It’s been trying to say the least,” Walter said. “The major thoroughfares, they seem to do pretty well, but the secondary roads were rather testy. That’s for sure.”
Walter’s street is a common sight for many of the neighborhoods on the hills in Altoona.
The city public works director, Nate Kissell, said they plow emergency routes first, then hills, and then flat roads. Walter said he doesn’t think that’s the case for where he lives though.
“It took them quite awhile to get here,” Walter said. “It did. It was tough. We had – I don’t want to say fend for ourselves but – we were probably the last people that got plowed out.”
Walter’s street got plowed Sunday, but with cars parked on both sides of the street and the extra snow piles, the roads are pretty narrow.
“On the routes, the avenues and streets in the town where people park on both sides, it’s just really tight for the trucks to get through and there’s no real easy way to do it,” Kissell said.
It’s a Catch 22; when plow trucks clear those streets, the cars lining either side get plowed in.
“That’s my son’s car and it’s completely plowed in,” Walter said, pointing across the street to his son’s car, almost invisible in a snow mound.
The solution seems to be to keep digging.
“Nothing a little ingenuity and a little back muscle can’t fix,” Walter said.
City workers said they’ll continue to help remove snow, too.
“Going into this week, we will be continuing to push back, going into the downtown area, going on to the bridges to push back sidewalks,” Kissell said. “A lot of snow removal… Anything over a foot we’re going to have to haul out so that’s a tedious task and we’ll probably have about a week in that process.”
