Much of Wake Forest still had a thawing white covering Wednesday afternoon, the remains of the weekend snow that brought four to five inches of snow Friday night into Saturday with an inch or more of sleet Saturday. A few more flurries Saturday and Sunday completed the wintery cake.
            Although Public Works Director Mike Barton said the town’s Operations Center did receive several telephone calls from homeowners on side streets urging them to hurry and plow that particular street, most of the town’s 60 miles of streets – up to 80 miles if you count the state-owned streets the trucks had to travel and usually plowed – were cleared or passable quite soon.
            “They really have done a great job on the city streets,” Commissioner Margaret Stinnett said Tuesday night. “I think they really deserve a pat on the back.”
            “They did a better job than DOT,” Town Manager Mark Williams agreed.
            Barton said one 75-year-old woman who moved here from Connecticut called to complain that her street was not plowed. By the time Barton finished telling her about the number of people he had available to work the six plows – 15 fulltime plus another three from other town divisions who came in to help – the miles of streets, the hours the men had worked already, she was ready to apologize for calling. She even called back to suggest they put plows on the garbage trucks, but Barton had to tell her the town does not own any garbage trucks. Garbage and recycling are collected through a contract with Republic.
            The weather forecast is a bit iffy for this coming weekend. “We’ve got one truck set up just in case. We’re in refill mode now,” Barton said Wednesday.
            “We spread brine Thursday afternoon and all day Friday,” Barton said, “and that kept the roads clear until about two or two-thirty [Saturday morning] when it started coming down so hard there was nothing we could do to keep up.
            The crews and six plows went out again Saturday morning and worked until about 6 p.m. when Barton said the temperature was too cold for the plows to do much good. He sent the men home to rest, and they returned Sunday and worked until dark again.
            “We hit it again hard Monday and Tuesday, and today we cleaned up the equipment and brought in sand,” Barton said.
            Three of the trucks with plows are also salt and sand spreaders, and they used a motor grader in downtown, the town hall area and few other areas that were “really stubborn,” in his words.
            There were no electrical outages, and the police department reported no more activity or accidents than normal.
            “We’ll wait to see what the weekend brings.”
            Wake Electric, which serves some of the town area and parts of Wake, Durham, Johnston, Franklin, Vance, Granville and Nash counties, said there were no storm related outages, and apparently that also held true for the Wake County area served by Progress Energy. At least one Wake Forest subdivision receives its power from Progress Energy.