Memphis public works details winter response; council urges school coordination
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Summary
Public Works Director Scott Morgan told the council the city treated priority routes with brine and plows beginning Jan. 21, deploying contractors and warming centers; council members pressed for clearer coordination with Shelby County Schools and for lessons learned on trash collection and automated trucks.
Public Works Director Scott Morgan told the Memphis City Council on Feb. 3 that the city mobilized a priority-based winter operations plan beginning Jan. 21 to keep emergency routes open and maintain connectivity to hospitals and warming centers.
"Our priority based winter operations plan, we began January 21," Morgan said, describing pretreatment with brine, 11 p.m. third-shift plowing and a mapped three-tier route system of primary, secondary and tertiary streets. He said the city used about 46,000 gallons of brine, treated roughly 1,800 lane miles (counting repeated treatments), applied about 2,500 tons of salt and logged more than 4,500 crew hours during the event.
Morgan described the storm as "historic," with up to 6 inches of snow and sleet and an extended spell with more than 3 inches on the ground. He said primary, secondary and tertiary routes are now largely clear and that warmer weather and rain had begun to improve travel conditions.
Councilwoman Jerry Green pressed whether school routes and access to schools were prioritized. Green said school closures keep parents at home and urged the city to coordinate with Shelby County Schools on "alternative pickup spots" on main roads so buses can meet students where cleared routes exist. "If the kids can't be in school, then the parents can't be at work," she said.
Chief Adams and Director Morgan said staff had reached out to schools and would pursue a joint plan to meet school staff at main collectors and consider alternative pickup points where neighborhood streets remain impassable. Chief Adams said the administration will bring Shelby County into the conversation to improve joint response.
A separate concern was solid-waste collection. Philip Davis, director of Solid Waste, said curb-to-curb collection with manual crews was hazardous during the ice and that service was suspended for seven business days beginning Jan. 24; he said crews will resume when conditions are safe and that the plan was to restart Wednesday customers while evaluating conditions daily.
Davis also addressed questions about automated collection trucks (sometimes called "one-armed bandit" vehicles). He said the citys current service model accepts outside-the-cart waste, which makes single-arm automated trucks ineffective without shifting to fully containerized collection. "We'd have to go to fully containerized service and eliminate outside the cart collection in order to make an automated truck reasonable in our system," Davis said.
Several council members praised staff for keeping major routes and emergency services functioning during an unusual combination of snow, sleet and ice and asked the administration to deliver a concise "lessons learned" report with one to three actionable improvements for future events.
The administration said it will convene an after-action debrief to identify blind spots and adjustments to interagency coordination and contractor deployment.
