Emergency responders and road crews got their first real dose of winter work overnight Wednesday into Thursday and may have another day of car crashes, road salt and plowing ahead of them tomorrow.
The state Department of Transportation deployed 41 plows across Lackawanna County to clear snow on Thursday and sent out eight trucks to spread brine over the roads in advance of the storm, said James May, a spokesman for PennDOT.
When the storm set in at around 2 p.m. Wednesday, a flurry of phone calls reporting car crashes sent city police to snow-slicked hills, including River Street at Cedar Avenue.
There, the storm sent a 1996 Volkswagen sliding through a stop sign on River Street across Cedar Avenue and into a pole, said acting Scranton police Capt. Glen Thomas.
The crash did not seriously damage the car, but it left a passenger, Christopher Bruno, 36, with a moderate ankle injury necessitating a trip to Geisinger Community Medical Center.
Altogether, Wednesday's storm dropped 5 inches in Montdale, the most in Lackawanna County, AccuWeather senior meteorologist Mike Pigott said. He said areas near Scranton saw about 3.5 inches of snow. Meanwhile, 2.9 inches of snow fell at the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport, and 4.7 inches hit the Dallas area, the most in Luzerne County.
On Wednesday, officers responded to about 20 accidents in the city between 3 and 11 p.m., Capt. Thomas said, though the majority of them were relatively minor and attributed to snow-covered roads.
By Saturday afternoon that may again be the case, though the forecast is a bit more forgiving than that of Wednesday's storm.
Carl Erickson, a senior meteorologist with AccuWeather, said a fast-moving system will pass through the area beginning at about sunrise Saturday and dump about 1 to 3 inches of snow by evening.
By Sunday the "fairly weak system" will have moved out and pulled in its wake winds of 10 to 20 mph and gusts of up to 30 mph into the area along with flurries, Mr. Erickson said.
Contact the writer: domalley@timesshamrock.com, @domalleytt on Twitter