PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — It is weather that many thought we’d seen the last of, but road crews with PennDOT and the City of Pittsburgh spent the day prepping for another round of snow.

All the preparations would make sense if it was a typical January evening and a typical January snowstorm, but it’s not.

It’s late April, and the storm we are bracing for is anything but typical.

“What we’re doing here today is getting all of our equipment remounted with winter maintenance – salt spreaders if you will – putting them on the backs of the trucks. We want to be prepared in the event, whatever the case may be,” said Jim Struzzi, of PennDOT.

“So, the crews are going to work right now and into this evening getting all the trucks refitted with our maintenance equipment,” said Struzzi, “and then we’ll have full crews out on the roads throughout the evening tonight and overnight, monitoring road conditions, trucks loaded with salt ready to go in the event that we do get this forecasted snow.”

Both PennDOT and the city have had to shift operations back to winter.

The snowfall in the city is expected to be wet and heavy, so the focus in the city is somewhat different if the forecast holds true.

“Actually, the heavy wet snow, we have a forestry division on standby that they’re going to be ready to respond to any tree problems and issues that we have,” said Rob Kaczorowski, of Pittsburgh Public Works. “The snow removal part, it will probably be, if we get the amount of snow they’re calling for, it will be a wet, slushy snow and we’ll be in a plow mode actually pushing the slush off the street.”

One thing that isn’t a concern this time around is salt supplies.

The warm weather this winter has left plenty in reserve, and with the warm ground temperatures, whatever does fall overnight and into the morning may not stick around long enough to create major problems.

It could however delay street repairs that the city started late last week.

“It’s going to delay our paving process. We have a contractor out paving streets. That’s probably going to be affected a little bit by the type of weather system we’re getting,” Kaczorowski said. “And obviously, the streets that we planned to do Monday and Tuesday are going to get pushed back to Wednesday and Thursday. So, our paving is going to be pushed back a little bit.”

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