Chesterton Street
Commissioner John Schnadenberg’s dog got him up at 4:30 this morning.
Which is why the
town’s streets were salted or being salted when folks left for work today.
“I couldn’t get
back to sleep,” Schnadenberg told the Chesterton Tribune. “So I
started listening to the weather. I was hearing reports of multiple
accidents in Chicago, and I knew the temperatures were going to drop, so I
sent the salters out.”
That was at 5 a.m.
When Dunelanders
woke, they found their car windows glazed, the sidewalks treacherous, trees
and bushes chandeliered by delicate pendants of ice. But the roadways in
Chesterton were just wet, maybe a little slushy in places.
Out in the
unincorporated county, Highway Superintendent Andy McKay reported, the roads
were definitely slick at 5:30 a.m. But his salters were on the job as well
and by 8 a.m. the ice had mostly been reduced to slush.
McKay added that
his salters would stay out today until all the roads had been treated, in
advance of this evening’s forecast cold snap, with overnight temps dipping
into low 20s.
This morning’s
freezing rain did prompt the Duneland Schools to call a two-hour delay.
NICTD
Meanwhile, just
before 10 a.m. the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District
temporarily suspended all South Shore train service, after the rush-hour
commute was sent into disarray by “extreme weather conditions.”
At 6:13 a.m. NICTD
reported westbound train 104 stopped in East Chicago “due to ice on overhead
wire and then westbound train 106 stopped at the state line for the same
reason. Two eastbound trains--205 and 7--were also annulled “due to late
turn of equipment.”
NIPSCO
On the upside, the
weather apparently gave NIPSCO a pass for once. At 8 a.m. the Northern
Indiana Public Service Company was reporting a total of 779 outages, all but
20 of them, however, affecting customers in Schererville.
At 10:20 a.m. total
outages had dropped to 28, none of them in Duneland.
Rainfall
For the record,
around 0.4 inches of rain fell at the Chesterton wastewater treatment plant
during Wednesday evening’s brief torrential downpour, with another 0.23
inches early this morning, for a 24-hour total--from 8 a.m. to 8 a.m.--of
0.63 inches.
Although the frozen
ground caused quite a bit more runoff to end up in the town’s collection
system than it would have following a summer storm, there was no diversion
of flow into the 1.2-million gallon storage basin, Chief Operator Bill
Williams told the Tribune.