Road Crews Cleaning Up After Ice Storm

The ice has almost melted away, now if only the sand would take care of itself so easily. News on 6 reporter Steve Berg says that has to be cleaned up the old-fashioned way, lots of work.<br/><br/>Of

Tuesday, January 23rd 2007, 10:26 am

By: News On 6

The ice has almost melted away, now if only the sand would take care of itself so easily. News on 6 reporter Steve Berg says that has to be cleaned up the old-fashioned way, lots of work.

Of course the sand is handy when we need traction on the ice, but now it's just a nuisance, and there are tons of it lying around.

A street sweeper was making a run along 11th street in downtown Tulsa. It wasn't his first, and it won't be his last.

"Oh, it's going to take multiple passes per street," said City of Tulsa worker Paul Strizek.

Strizek says sand is a lot heavier than the usual debris the sweepers face, and it's spread out a lot farther.

"Normally we're just sweeping the curb line. Now because we have sand across the entire width of the street, we're going to be sweeping the full width of the roadway," Strizek said.

Sweepers say the trucks fill up a lot faster than normal, which means they have to spend more time dumping them out.

"Some of these intersections, we might fill up in 20 minutes just doing around the intersections,â€ city worker Robert Hoppis said.

For the first time ever the city is going to bring some of the sand back to the sand yard, theyâ€™re experimenting with recycling. The key will be how much junk gets picked up along the way.

"Cans, glass, vegetative matter, whatever. It's going to have to be like 98 percent sand in order for us to be able to reuse it," said Strizek.

The City of Tulsa will have ten crews working around the clock, but it's a huge job.

"We have enough lane miles to go from Los Angeles to New York and back, so we have about 5,000 lane miles of streets," said Strizek.

With ten crews working around the clock the City of Tulsa thinks they can get all the main streets done in two weeks, at a cost of $70,000.