CLEVELAND — Less than 12 hours after Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb announced updates to the city’s snow removal plan, including an online snow plow tracker, the new program was put to the test.
Snowfall blanketed much of the greater Cleveland area Friday morning, making the streets slick and slippery.
Much like anyone who was behind a wheel in the morning, 3News was around town following up on the Bibb administration’s promise to better tend to roads during snowy weather.
The new mayor announced Thursday how he plans to make sure the city responds better to severe winter conditions, like what we saw after the major snowstorm on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
“It's phase one, we want to make sure we have upgrades updated over time based on feedback from residents,” Bibb said Thursday. Part of phase one is an online snow plow tracker that provides live updates of where city plows are and the streets that have been cleared.
“We launched an online snowplow tracker in a week,” Bibb said in a sit-down interview with 3News’ Leon Bibb.
The tracker ran into kinks on its first day. It failed to load due to “technical difficulties," shutting the tracker down for about an hour in the middle of snowfall.
A city spokesperson told 3news an overwhelmed system crashed the servers.
Amid the tracker’s downtime, we followed snow plows around the city, which remained busy and were able to hit residential streets in due time.
“The best thing I can do as mayor is truly prioritize getting back to the basics,” Bibb said.
The city currently has 148 employees, nearly 60 dump trunks and 13 pick-up trucks for snow removal, with more than a on the way to help plow more streets all at once.
“That’s why we are trying to bring 20 additional trucks and 20 additional drivers to support our snowplow removal,” Bibb said.
You can follow the snowplow tracker live here.
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