ROCHELLE – A record-breaking snowstorm hit the community on Halloween and the city street department did everything in its power to keep travel in the ‘Hub City’ safe.
Many portions of the state were impacted by a snowstorm extremely early this season, including Rochelle, and the city’s street department used all available resources to keep the roads clear.
While the city knew the storm was coming, current projects around town limited their resources during the storm.

“We are still in the middle of other projects, so we had to scramble a little bit to get salt spreaders on and plows hooked up to the trucks,” explained street department director Tim Isley. “We were also a little short on trucks, so we had to use some trucks that we normally wouldn’t use.”
Salt for this coming winter has not yet been ordered, but luckily the city still had salt leftover from last season.
While all of the weather stations had been predicting a big snow storm, city officials at the street department did not expect to get this much.
“I did not expect to get this much, I was actually hoping that it would just miss us all together but we didn’t get that lucky,” added Isley. “We will definitely be more prepared for the next one, we still have to get all of our anti-icing materials delivered and made and get our salt bin filled up. So, we still have quite a bit of preparation work to do before winter truly arrives.”