West Seattle snow aftermath: Plows on power trucks?

Just back from City Hall, where we tried our best to represent Seattle’s growing online-neighborhood-news industry on a City Council panel discussion (not archived on SeattleChannel.org yet but should be soon), and there’s more post-storm council action to relay: Tomorrow at 2 pm, the Energy and Technology Committee will focus on this aspect of snowstorm response past and future:

Winter Storm Response — Discussion of City Light’s participation in the winter storm response and purchase of snowplow equipment for mounting on existing Seattle City Light trucks. It is in the interest of public safety to improve the City’s ability to clear city streets of snow so that City Light vehicles, fire apparatus, emergency medical units, police cars, ambulances, and other emergency vehicles are able to navigate city streets.

Here’s the full agenda; some interesting technology items too, led by the city’s tech boss Bill Schrier (a West Seattleite). Meantime, Seattle Channel sends an alert that three councilmembers can be seen criticizing the city’s response to last month’s Snowmare during a show that’s available online now or premiering on Cable Channel 21 tonight at 7.

Lisa January 28, 2009 (5:49 pm)

Tracy, you did a great job representing online journalism on Channel 21 today. It was a very informative session with many thoughts exchanged on print journalism (past, present & future), modern media sources (web, TV, etc), information needs of citizens, and the different types of business models news papers could be forming (non-profit, employee owned, etc). Great job!

WSB January 28, 2009 (6:03 pm)

Thank you!

Johnston January 28, 2009 (9:44 pm)

Sounds dandy, not only for City Light trucks but also lots of other city owned trucks (parks? water?)… But…if I’m snowed in AND my power is out, I want those SCL crews restoring power! The roads can wait at that point!

GenHillOne January 29, 2009 (10:03 am)

Now they’re thinking! I can get behind purchasing and storing blades rather than snowplows.

And yes, Johnston, let’s hope they look at all the trucks. The good news is that City Light could plow on its way to fix the outages (or even possibly get to outages that may be inaccessible without a plow).

PDH January 29, 2009 (1:06 pm)

My husband and I discussed something similar for the garbage trucks. If they had snowblades on the front of their trucks they would have been able to pick up the trash and at the same time help clear the roads.

Sorry, comment time is over.