From the evening of Sunday, February 14 through the morning on Friday, Feb. 19, TDOT used approximately 18,000 tons of salt and logged over 99,000 miles clearing and treating snow-laden roadways across 21 counties in West Tennessee’s Region 4, according to a news release from the Tennessee Dept. of Transportation (TDOT).
The Carroll County area received as much as six to eight inches of snow, during two snowfalls, depending on which area of the county you lived. According to the National Weather Service, southwest Carroll County in the Cedar Grove area may have received the deepest snow with the measurement of eight inches.
TDOT actually began preparation for the bad weather on Feb. 11 according to Regions 4 TDOT Community Relations Officer Nichole Lawrence.
“Our crews worked 24 hours a day in shifts during this past week,” said Lawrence.
Used for fast acton melting were salt brine with additives of potato juice and calcium chloride.
By Friday the main highways in the Region 4 area were clear.
“We dodged the bullet,” said Carroll County Emergency Management Janice Newman concerning the recent bad weather. The Carroll County Civic Center would have become a warming center if the need had arisen and electric power had been out for a prolonged time.
However, the need never occurred. Although the power was out for between 400 and 500 customers, it was restored within one-to-two and a half hours, according to Carroll County Electric Department (CCED) manager Danny Brawner.
“The vast majority of those outages occurred on Thursday in the Leach area around the Carroll County 1,000-Acre Recreational Lake,” he said. “Most of these power failures were due to trees or limbs falling across power lines.”
He added there were a few scattered outages in other parts of the county.
“We were very fortunate not to have a lot of ice on the lines,” he said.
Brawner also pointed out that the CCED and TVA were able to handle the additional load of usage during last week’s extremely cold temperatures without any problems.
Carroll County Fire Chief Terry Bradshaw said the county was lucky in the fact there were only two fire calls that had to be answered during the inclement weather.
Temperatures reached the 0 mark in chill factor degrees in some instances during the past week.
One fire was on reported on Feb. 13 at 9:15 p.m. when Clarksburg and Westport Fire Departments answered a call to 5405 Westport Road to a shed fire where a man lived. The shed belonged to Amanda Edmondson. The man was able to escape without injury but the shed was a total loss, according to Bradshaw. Red Cross assistance was provided for the man who was not named.
A second fire happened Feb. 21 at 1:59 p.m. at 2070 Buck Ditch Road at Terrance Johnson’s residence where only minor damage occurred. The fire was believed to have been caused by an electrical short. Clarksburg and Westport Fire Departments checked it out.
Huntingdon Fire Dept. did not report any fires during the past week.
Terry Sellers, secretary at Carroll County Motors, said the wrecker service answered five wreck calls during the duration of the bad weather and about 15 stuck-in-the snow and off-in-the ditch calls.
“A couple of the vehicles flipped upside down,” she said. “There were scratches and bruises, but no really serious injuries resulted.”
