KENT COUNTY, Mich. -- The Kent County Road Commission reported "good progress" Wednesday morning in clearing main roads of snow and ice.
The National Weather Service recorded 5-and-a-half inches of snowfall at the Gerald R. Ford International Airport. The KCRC said it was planning to make one pass of the primary roads and neighborhood streets by the end of the day. Director Jerry Byrne urges motorists to give road commission snowplow trucks plenty of room to operate while they're clearing the roadways.
"And you're better to be late than be injured or wreck your car. So, if you see those green lights, you see amber lights, back off, given them some room. Don't pass. The force of that snow coming off that blade is great today, with that heavy, wet snow," Byrne said.
The snow and ice worked in tandem with the brisk winds to bring down a lot of electrical lines overnight in different parts of the state. More than 45,000 power outages were reported statewide this morning. That had been whittled down to about 31,000 outages at the time of this report early Thursday afternoon. That's according to the online Consumer Energy Outage Map.
Consumers Energy spokeswoman Tracy Whimmer tells us what the most-impacted areas were.
"The vast majority of the outages are on the west side (of the state), in the greater space between Grand Rapids and Muskegon. There is a little bit in the northeast corner of the state, but largely we are seeing it on the west side there," Whimmer said.
Whimmer and Byrnes were guests on West Michigan's Morning News.
###