Kansas City added snow plow drivers. But some residents say East Side still neglected
Editor’s note: Some interviews for this article were conducted in Spanish and have been translated to English.
On Friday afternoon, Marío Esquivel shoveled ice and snow outside his house near East 27th Street and Oakley Ave.
The East Side resident said the road conditions in his neighborhood had made it impossible to get to work the past two days.
“It’s money that I’m losing for my family,” the 57-year-old said.
A winter storm dumped as much as nine inches of snow across parts of the Kansas City metro Thursday. While some residents have praised the city’s new snow removal plan, which includes 100 additional drivers and 50 more snowplows, others say the East Side still doesn’t get the same attention as other areas.
The city’s snow plow map shows where crews have cleared the streets. The map Friday afternoon showed that about 10 blocks near Esquivel’s home had not been plowed in the past 24 hours. Meanwhile, streets to the immediate west had been plowed within the past 8 to 16 hours, and roads further west from Prospect Avenue had been plowed in the past four hours.
Esquivel lives on a downhill street. It was still caked in a layer of ice.
“It’s really dangerous,” he said.
Maggie Green, a spokeswoman for the city, said Friday that drivers were out on all the routes, clearing major roads and neighborhood streets.
“Yes, some areas are taking longer to clear because some areas of the city got more snow,” Green said in an email. “The amount of snow we got is requiring multiple passes to plow in some cases, which is made challenging by refreezing overnight.”
The city’s new snow removal plan also includes plowing residential streets in 24-hour shifts instead of only during daylight hours and more aggressively pretreating with salt.
Before the new plan, a winter storm like Thursday’s would have shut down the city for two to three days, Chris Hernandez, a city spokesman, said in an email Saturday.
“Instead – KCMO kept humming, stayed open, and many residents have noted that on Friday our streets were in better shape than surrounding suburbs and the state-maintained highways that run through KCMO,” he said.
A few blocks away from Esquivel, near 2500 Drury Avenue, Greg Nations cleared snow and ice off his truck Friday afternoon.
He’s lived at his house for 40 years and grown frustrated with the city’s street-clearing response.
“It’s the last one that gets treated it seems,” said Nations, 65. “They don’t worry about us as much as the downtown.”
The city’s crews have been in 24-hour operation since Wednesday and will continue through the weekend. Temperatures Saturday are expected to be above freezing and Sunday’s forecast calls for highs in the mid-to-upper 50s.
This story was originally published February 18, 2022 at 5:28 PM.
