photo by: Shawn Valverde

Massachusetts Street being cleared of snow on Monday, Jan. 6, 2025.

The calendar had barely flipped from 2024 to 2025, but Mike Lawless was already bracing for what might be his department’s biggest operation of the year.

A serious storm was coming, and for his snow removal team with Lawrence’s Municipal Services and Operations division, that was going to mean days of nonstop work — an operation that would span more than a week, sometimes with people working 12-hour shifts and plows and trucks operating around the clock.

“It’s a 24-hour operation,” Lawless said. “Once we start, we just keep going.”

All told, the storm dumped a foot of snow in Lawrence, on top of a layer of ice between a tenth and a quarter-inch thick. It’s easy to say it was the biggest storm of the year so far, but Lawless said it was also the biggest snow event he’d seen in his seven years of overseeing Lawrence’s snow removal.

And you can measure the response in so many ways: in miles of streets or gallons of brine, in numbers of workers or hours of time. Here’s a closer look at how it all came together.

Two days of brine

The planning started the day after New Year’s Day, and, like most people’s planning for a severe storm, it started with checking the forecast.

The city has a contract with a specialized weather service for that — it’s called Weather or Not, and it provides forecasts and updates specific to the city. Lawless said that includes basic information that you might find in other weather reports, such as the timing of the storm or what kind of precipitation to expect, but also some extra details that are useful for his team, like when the road temperatures will go below freezing to cause things to stick.

Here, the reports showed that before the snow arrived, things were going to get slippery. So the work would have to start two days before the storm did, “to keep things from sticking as long (they) can.”

Lawless’ crews were on the city’s biggest roads on the Thursday and Friday before the storm, coating them with stripes of brine.

The brine liquid is a protective layer that inhibits ice from forming. Because of its salt content, it has a lower freezing point than pure water does, so it’s more difficult for the road to freeze when winter precipitation falls on it.

A hot tub might hold about 500 gallons of liquid. The amount of brine the MSO department used on Lawrence’s roads before the storm was about 30,000 gallons, Lawless estimated. That’s enough to fill about 60 hot tubs.

Early Saturday afternoon, the rain started to fall, so it was time to switch to sand and salt — and to start working around the clock.

A hundred and one hours

Lawless and his team were ready to go at noon on Saturday, Jan. 4. They wouldn’t stop salting, plowing and clearing until 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 8.

That’s 101 hours of work.

“It’s a large operation,” Lawless said. And, like all large operations, the people watching it from the outside barely have a sense of the whole picture.

At least 40 people are working solely on snow and ice removal each day during the period of round-the-clock storm response, Lawless said. Some of them are manning the 16 trucks that make up the most visible part of the plowing operation, and they plow for 12-hour shifts.

But the trucks require a lot of support to operate constantly in frigid conditions.

People at the MSO department’s facility have to load the trucks with sand and salt when they run out, he said — 1,800 to 2,000 tons of the sand and salt mixture went onto the roads during the event. There also have to be mechanics working around the clock to ensure the plows don’t have any issues. For each 12-hour shift, two mechanics, a supervisor and a “parts guy” have to be on call, Lawless said.

Then there are eight workers who plow at the airport and clear city parking garages and sidewalks around public buildings like City Hall, Lawless said. And the effort even includes administrative staff, who Lawless said take “a lot more calls” from residents during major snow events than normal.

“It’s a full department, not just street staff,” Lawless said. “It’s pretty much all hands on deck.”

Pass after pass

The city of Lawrence spans about five and a half miles from north to south, and about eight from east to west. But clearing snow off of a street isn’t measured like driving on a highway. It’s not about miles per se: it’s about lane-miles, and Lawrence has a lot of them.

Take Iowa Street. From Sixth Street to the South Lawrence Trafficway, it’s about 3.5 miles. But there are five lanes on Iowa Street — two in each direction, and a left turn lane in the center. All of them are covered in snow, and all of them need to be plowed.

So, clearing this 3.5-mile street is actually a more-than-17-mile job when you take all of its lanes into account.

Lawless said his crews typically plow at least 870 lane-miles when it snows. But this time, he can “guarantee” that the crews plowed even more.

Because of the sheer volume of snow that fell last Saturday night and Sunday, most roads had to have multiple passes. Crews ran through the busiest routes like Iowa Street “at least four or five times,” Lawless said.

photo by: Shawn Valverde

A car stuck is stuck in the road in South Park on Monday, Jan. 6, 2025.

What takes them so long?

When this much snow falls, Lawless said, things slow down a lot. You have to do some things over and over, and other things get in your way.

The things you have to do over and over are the priority routes. These are the streets with the most travelers, including arterial streets like Iowa Street, Tennessee Street and 23rd Street and areas around school zones, bridges or the hospital. Lawless said his team gets on these roads and “stays on those” to ensure that emergency vehicles can get around.

The things that get in your way — aside from the foot of white stuff — are often other cars.

Between noon Saturday and 9 a.m. Monday, the Lawrence Police Department had to respond to 56 noninjury crashes, three injury crashes and 140 stranded motorists in Lawrence. The streets were “littered with abandoned vehicles” that were trapped in the snow.

The crews clearing the road obviously can’t just push the stuck vehicles out of the way with their plows. Either they have to wait for the vehicles to get unstuck, or they have to go around them, Lawless said.

“If we can get people to stay home and off the streets, it makes our job safer, faster and more efficient,” Lawless said.

It’s important to prevent these unexpected situations for the workers as much as possible, because they already have a lot on their plates. Due to staff turnover, Lawless said the department does not have as many experienced people who have “seen an event like this.” Many drivers aren’t as seasoned, and it’s not always automatic for them to know their routes, Lawless said.

Piling it up and trucking it away

In addition to the teams specifically plowing the snow, it takes around 15 additional MSO staff from other divisions to clear the snow from downtown.

And those workers have to have experience with bulldozers, backhoes and dump trucks, because Lawless said downtown works a little differently from other parts of the city.

With the sawtooth parking along Massachusetts Street and parallel parking spaces on other downtown streets, crews can’t just plow to the side like they do elsewhere in the city. Instead, the snow goes into the middle of the street.

But that causes its own unique problems.

“There’s not enough space in the middle to handle the amount of snow and still allow traffic to pass,” Lawless said. “At that point, we have to start trucking it.”

On Monday, the day after the snowstorm, Massachusetts Street was filled with heavy machines scooping up snow from piles as big as they were and loading it into the dump trucks. Then, the trucks go across the river and dump their icy cargo in North Lawrence, on a city-owned property behind Johnny’s Tavern.

photo by: Bremen Keasey

Piles of snow that sit on city-owned land near Johnny’s Tavern in North Lawrence, shown on Jan. 10, 2025. The MSO hauled snow from downtown to this spot as part of the snow removal in the city.

More work to do

There was another unpleasant surprise in store once the major streets were clear — an extra dose of snow on Thursday night.

Lawless and his crews initially expected it to be a dusting. But soon the forecast was calling for up to 3 inches. So it was back to overnight shifts on Thursday to clear it off — and that meant crews again had to focus their attention on the arterial and connector streets instead of fully clearing other residential routes.

Although the sunny weather on Friday helped melt more snow, Lawless said the crews would still have work to do on residential streets that still had “some inches left” from the first storm. He said he fully expected the department would get calls from residents about streets not being cleared, but that it was important to maintain a good outlook about it.

“We’re not perfect. We know it happens,” Lawless said. “This is all part of the learning curve we have, and we get better every time.”

Lawless said there is no trusting the winter weather in Kansas — one day it’ll be in the 50s, the next it might be below zero — but that comes along with the job. And although his team will show up for the next storm, too, he’s hoping the forecast stays clear for a while.

“When that’s what we’re dealt, we’ll deal with it,” Lawless said. “But we’ll take any sunny days we can get.”