Snow way! St. Charles gets 50 inches

Mother Nature must think St. Charles looks better wearing white.

That appears to be the case, anyway, considering the city is way ahead of schedule this year in terms of snowfall.

As of Feb. 3, officials said St. Charles had already received 50 inches in 22 "snow events" -- and that's not including the flakes falling outside as this column was being written.

Historically, the city gets 30 to 40 inches in 20 snow events, which means there was enough to fire up the plows and spread out the salt.

Cleaning it up ain't cheap.

The city estimates it spends roughly $11,500 for each cumulative inch of snow, which would equate to $575,000 so far this year. And, again, it's only mid-February.

Street crews already have dumped so much salt and sand -- 7,050 tons compared to 4,500 tons in a typical year -- that the city council had to approve an emergency purchase of 1,500 additional tons of rock salt for about $75,000.

So here's an open memo to our weather maker in the sky: enough with the snow, or the groundhog gets it.

If you're traveling: Even if you're an expert driver when it comes to wintry weather, there are a couple stretches of St. Charles roads you might want to avoid regardless of whether there's snow.

St. Charles police Tuesday released their annual assessment of the top 10 car crash locations for 2007, and the results were somewhat surprising. The worst spots are no longer the intersections of Second Street with East Main and Illinois Streets, which saw a combined 42 accidents in 2006.

Rather, the 600 block of South Randall Road, between Route 38 and Prairie Street, topped this year's list with 25 accidents. Twenty of them were rear-end crashes.

Officers chalked up the change to roadwork along Randall Road, which wrapped up in October.

"It's believed that the construction continued to contribute to crashes on Randall Road during those first 10 months of the year," the report states. "The completion of the project also seemed to lessen the amount of traffic on the secondary streets ... as the traffic flow on Randall Road went back to normal."

No. 2 on the list was the 2000 block of West Main Street, which had 18 accidents. It was followed, in order, by: the 3800 block of East Main Street with 17 accidents; the 100 block of South Kirk Road with 15; the 100 block of East Main Street with 15; the 1400 block of East Main Street with 14; the 1500 block of East Main Street with 14; the 1100 block of East Main Street with 13; the 700 block of South Randall Road with 12 and the 100 block of West Main Street with 12.

That's a grand total of 103 crashes on both ends of Main Street, with the bulk of them (73) on the east side.

"The vast majority of the accidents on East Main Street continue to be rear-end collisions, with inattentive drivers running into vehicle stopped in traffic making a left turn," police said. "It's believed that those types of accidents will continue until the roadway can be re-engineered with a center turn lane," a long-delayed state project.