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2012 Snow Storm, By The Numbers

Bryan Buckalew
01/20/2012

So far, Seattle has spent an estimated $800,000 cleaning up this week's snow storm. KUOW's Bryan Buckalew has the stats so far.

TRANSCRIPT

There's no way to get around this. Here comes some numbers: Since the beginning of this week's storm, Seattle has spread over 3,000 tons of granular salt and 48,000 gallons of salt brine. Just for comparison, if salt brine were beer, that would be over 3,000 kegs.

City workers have logged almost 2,000 hours of overtime. If that were one person, it would be about a year's worth of work. Rick Sheridan speaks for Seattle's Department of Transportation.

Sheridan: "Any major storm is going to cost some money. When you put people on 24–hour–a–day response. When you utilize large amounts of materials. When your equipment is out there running 24 hours a day, you're going to have costs. Whether this is more or less than a previous storm, I can't really say."

Sheridan did say that Seattle has about $2 million budgeted for emergency weather response for 2012. That means there's still enough to buy a lot more salt.

For KUOW News, I'm Bryan Buckalew.