After facing more than 2 feet of snow with drifts towering even higher this past weekend, county officials on Monday were preparing for the unthinkable:

Round two.

The area hadn’t dug out from the Blizzard of 2010 and forecasters were calling for as much as an additional foot of snow Tuesday night into Wednesday.

“Another 12 inches of snow would paralyze us,” said Tim Burgess, chief of the county’s Bureau of Highways, on Feb. 8. “We’re not built for this.”

Burgess, who has 34 years experience in handling storms, called this past weekend’s storm “unprecedented.”

“A lot of people are telling me they’ve never seen anything like this,” he said. “Trust me, they haven’t.”

Handling the snow that fell Feb. 5 through mid-day Feb. 6 was a plowing operation. The county still has about half of the 40,000 tons of salt it started the season with, he said.

Burgess said many of the main roads were passable Monday morning.

“They’re not what county residents are used, to but they’re passable,” he said.

Addressing the side streets late Sunday and Monday presented a whole new set of problems. For instance, Burgess said two plows sent to an Arbutus neighborhood broke down — and when a third responded to the area it, too, became stuck.

He said the county is trying to get to everyone, but said small courts and cul-de-sacs present significant challenges.

“We’re going to try and punch a hole into them so (residents) can dig out to us,” Burgess said.

Those who managed to dig their cars out and dump the snow into the streets often saw their hard work negated by a plow.

“When we do get there, that snow is going right back where it came from,” Burgess said.

Fatigue has also been an issue, he said.

“There are no shifts,” he said. “(Crews) work until they get tired and they take a break. (Drivers) are doing a hell of a job, but the breaks are starting to get longer.”

Burgess estimated the price tag for the blizzard will top $4 million, and that’s before this next storm hits.

Even prior to the blizzard, the county had plowed through the $6 million budgeted for emergency storm cleanup.

Don Mohler, spokesman for County Executive Jim Smith, said Monday the storm cleanup budget has always been a “placeholder” amount. More money will spent to do the job, and streets will continue to be cleared.

“It is what it is,” Mohler said of the cost. “We’re just going to have to go into this budget and find the money.”

Mohler said he and Smith tried last week to ward off the storm with a little anti-snow dance.

“I used all my bad dance moves,” Mohler said. “I even had the county executive doing a little butter-churn move.”

It didn’t work.

Snow and pancakes, piled high

County highway crews worked overtime to clear streets, but it was hard for Sherry Lyons, of Cockeysville, to muster gratitude. She can’t get to the street.

Bosley Road was plowed as of Monday, but there’s a pile of snow between the end of her driveway that’s a car length long.

“It’s not only piled high, it’s frozen,” she said. “You couldn’t get through it with a pickax.”

Lyons has lived seven winters in Rochester and Buffalo, N.Y., where they measure snow by feet. “But there, they know how to handle it,” she said.

Her grown daughter put out an SOS e-mail looking for someone willing to clear the pile away, she said. It noted she was willing to pay cash.

A woman with two kids responded, Lyons said. But she’s worried about traffic on the curve where she lives, and “there is no way I would let little children do it.”
“I’m trapped,” she said.

Meanwhile, as crews were hopping all weekend, so was the I-Hop in Cockeysville — hopping with customers, that is. In fact, there were people who wanted to eat there on Saturday, but they had to be turned away, said Joanne Kim, who owns the restaurant with her husband, Paul.

Their parking lot was only half-plowed, she said. “It was ugly.”

The restaurant opened Sunday, and by Monday cabin fever had produced a crowd.

Residents George and Renate Shelley, of Loch Raven Village, arrived before lunch, but only thanks to teenage brothers Matthew and Andrew  Ringrose,  who live next door. The brothers shoveled out their cars, their deck, their stairs and their sidewalk.

“God may not give you want you want,” Renate said, “but he gives you what you need. These boys have been wonderful.”

BGE powers in; schools out

At the beginning of the week, Baltimore County Public Schools announced schools would be closed at least through Feb. 10. At the time, schools spokesman Charles Herndon said the 172 schools and facilities operated by the system were not yet cleared of snow.

“Like everybody else, we’re dealing with this as best as we can,” Herndon said, adding that the school system lends its trucks to the county to help clear roads first.

“At this point, I’m not even sure any of that equipment has even been released (back) to us,” he said.

The storm provided a difficult scenario for Baltimore Gas & Electric in terms of providing power to residents — heavy, wet snow, and lots of it.

On Feb. 6, BGE reported 35,730 customers without power throughout the utility’s service area, including 12,757 customers in Baltimore County and 3,147 in Baltimore City.

By Monday, those numbers had decreased to 1,030 in the county, 82 in the city and 3,866 overall. Some 850 BGE and contract personnel, along with 300 linemen and support staff from Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio, restored power to 93,615 customers over the three days.

Reporter Loni Ingraham contributed to this story.

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