Orangetown, County Highway Departments Report Few Problems

The Orangetown and Rockland County Highway Departments reported few issues with Tuesday's snowfall.

Orangetown Highway Superintendent James Dean said that the roads were clear and his department had moved on to the sidewalks by the afternoon.

"Everything is cleaned up pretty well," Dean said at about 1 p.m. "We had trucks out early. Last night, we did a couple of spots and we had the whole crew in at about 5:30 this morning. We had everything done in time for the school buses."

Dean said that the highway department is nearly done with fall leaf pickup, with 30,000 yards collected, about 94 percent of what they expect to deal with. 

"The last couple of days, we changed over 10 leaf removal trucks to snow so we would have a full complement of ice and snow control," Dean said. "That took half of the leaf fleet out, but I'm not concerned about that."

Dean said 34 percent of the leaf pickup was done with workers on overtime, which had been a point of discussion during the 2014 town budget process.

Rockland County Highway Superintendent Charles “Skip” Vezzetti estimated the snowfall at three inches in the southern part of the county and an inch and half in New City. He said crews were out salting the county roads on Monday night.

“Our roads are black and running, no problems,” said Vezzetti. “We were way ahead of the curve on this (storm).” 

He said the county’s 170 miles of roadway were prepped early on. Vezzetti said he does not expect much more accumulation.

Editor's note: Patch Editor Robin Traum contributed to this report.