With much of North Carolina bracing itself for another winter storm, Gov. Josh Stein once again wants drivers to carefully consider their travel plans heading into a weekend.
Speaking at a Wake County N.C. Department of Transportation maintenance facility on Thursday, Stein said, "If you can stay home Friday night and bundle up, we recommend you doing it. These guys need to be on the roads plowing — preparing before the storm with brine and then applying salt and sand to deal with it."
Forecasters are expecting this storm to bring several inches of snow to much of the state beginning Friday evening and lasting into Sunday, including about 15 inches in Manteo, nearly 12 inches in Morehead City, eight inches in Charlotte and Raleigh, seven inches in Greensboro and five inches in Asheville.
"It's kind of backwards from what most people expect. There is also concern about overwash from tide on the Outer Banks, so people on the Outer Banks need to be careful," Stein said.
Stein declared a state of emergency Thursday ahead of the storm, allowing North Carolina to qualify for federal assistance if it needs to request it and activating the State Emergency Response Team.
Like last weekend's storm, temperatures are supposed to remain chilly into the following work week. But the key difference is that the coming storm is expected to mainly be a snow event, where last weekend's was mainly ice.
That means Stein and other officials remain concerned about roadways but hope it will not bring the threat of widespread power outages that last weekend's storm did.
"That doesn't mean that there will not be power outages. There almost surely will be power outages, but it won't be in the entirety of a region. It'll be in more specific locations," Stein said.
Transportation concerns
DOT teams started to apply brine on Thursday, with the first snowflakes anticipated to reach North Carolina on Friday evening. DOT Secretary Daniel Johnson assured Stein on Thursday that the agency is confident it has adequate salt and sand supplies to treat the state's roadways before and after the storm.
Once the snow has fallen, DOT crews need to prioritize highways, then major state roads and then secondary roads.
"We wish, after a big storm that (all roads could be cleared) within 24 hours. That's just not the way the world works," Stein said. "So we ask people to be patient, to understand that it's better to not be on the roads if you possibly cannot be."
If driving is absolutely necessary, Stein said, people should leave plenty of space to the car ahead of them and drive more slowly than they might otherwise.
Ahead of last week's storm, North Carolina received an emergency declaration from the federal government. That gave federal agencies the opportunity to provide things like generators and chainsaw crews to assist with the immediate storm response.
If such assistance is needed for this snow storm, Stein said, he would need to request a separate emergency declaration.
"We don't know yet if we're going to need to do that," Stein said.
