City Manager Facing Big Storm: ‘There Is No Bad Weather, Just Bad Clothes’
The November gales kick up waves on Lake Superior earlier this week. Courtesy William Vajda / City of Marquette
Successful snow removal efforts rarely attract headlines. For this frigid city, they’re prepared 365 days for inclement weather.
Cities often make big headlines when they’re caught off guard and aren’t able to respond effectively to inclement weather, especially when certain public officials are out of town and seem particularly insensitive to their constituents’ problems.
Consider District of Columbia Mayor Marion Barry in 1987 relaxing in sunny Southern California for Super Bowl XXI, drinking champagne and cognac and playing poker while the nation’s capital got hit by back-to-back snowstorms. Or the mysteries involving Michael Bloomberg’s whereabouts during some blizzards when he was New York City mayor. Or late last year, Lansing Board of Power & Light General Manager Peter Luke facing intense heat for an ill-timed out-of-town trip during a crippling mid-Michigan ice storm.
But what happens when something like snow removal goes more or less according to plan? Those stories rarely get attention.
We decided to check in with William Vajda, the city manager in Marquette, a city of roughly 20,000 people on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It’s a place that’s no stranger to snow storms. (Vajda wrote a guest post for GovExec State & Local last month on micropolitan economies.)
The early-season record-setting snowstorm that blew across the Upper Midwest this week and deposited 3 1/2 feet of snow in some places on the Upper Peninsula was certainly a big deal, creating treacherous travel conditions.
Vajda reports that Marquette city work crews cleared 100 miles of city streets within four hours of the storm and were able to keep them clear after the snowfall.
While many cities prepare their snow-removal fleets in the fall, Vajda says that Marquette, one of the snowiest places in the United States, keeps its public works vehicles ready year-round to deal with snow, noting that it’s usually the first and the last snowstorms of the season that are the most difficult to deal with.
In such a snowy place, public officials and residents just have to be prepared.
"There is no bad weather, just bad clothes," Vajda says.
In addition to the snow, there are also the November gales, which can whip of 25-feet to 35-feet waves on Lake Superior, which created some lakeshore flooding for Marquette. This week’s storm also hit on the 39th anniversary of the massive November 1975 storm that sank the Edmund Fitzgerald on Lake Superior, an event Vajda says helped change the way localities in his part of the country think about emergency planning and response.
Take a look at some of the photos Vajda sent our way ...
