Bad Weather Observation

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If you can’t stay home, observe these tips when driving in bad weather:

Slow down.
Make sure your car/truck is in good condition.
Leave early.
If it looks good, it doesn’t always mean it’s good.
Put the cell phone down.

How to better share the road with snow plows:

Dim your lights.
Slow down.
Stay back at least 50 feet.
Resist the urge to pass.
Stay on your own side of the road.

MILLERSBURG — By 9 p.m. Friday, after fueling up and getting a new load of salt in the bed of his truck, Holmes County Highway worker Trent Taylor was hitting his route for the third time that day.
It would be his last for the evening, knowing that when he headed home about midnight, it would only be a couple of hours before he’d be called back in to do his part

As the night progressed, the snow and wind picked up, with the plowed path on one side barely visible as he made his way down the opposite side.
“It drives you crazy. You get it all cleared up and looking nice and then you come back through and it’s covered again.”
Although “not too bad tonight,” Taylor said, “Sometimes it’s snowing so hard you can’t even see. Sometimes you just have to pull over and wait.”
With snow reflecting light from the truck’s headlights and those of oncoming vehicles, he said, the work is made more difficult at night.
“We’re concentrating hard enough doing what we’re doing, when someone comes at you with heir bright lights, you can’t see,” he said, advising drivers to turn off their bright lights when approaching a plow because “a snow plow will open up a car like a can opener.”
Visibility throughout the night also was compromised by heavy winds, with occasionally interrupting his stories of past storms, snow, ice, drifting and bad drivers. “That’s about a nine (on a 10-poiint scale) right there,” he said, as a major gust of wind coupled with falling snow to temporarily make the road almost

“The worst thing is the black ice,” he said, noting motorists have a tendency to travel at unsafe speeds when the hazard is invisible.
He reminds drivers that sometimes the roads look perfectly fine, but are super slick.
The nighttime snowfall left an estimated four-six inches of snow on the ground across Holmes and Wayne counties, where roads were starting to become clearer by mid-morning Saturday.
Throughout the day, both counties remained under emergency snow levels due to blowing and drifting snow, which made passage along some roads difficult and hazardous.
County road crews in both counties began a renewed attack on the roads between 4 and 4:30 a.m. Saturday.
“We’re starting to get ahead of them,” said T.J. Shamp, operations manager for the Holmes County Engineer’s Office, around 10:30 a.m.
“We had heavy drifting and a slow-moving, heavy squall that settled over Wayne County for awhile, but now that the sun is coming out, the salt is starting to work,” said Shamp, noting passage along some roads remains difficult because of drifting