Some winters in Eureka Springs in the past ten years have been mild. But the winter of 2022-2023 has brought severe winter weather, including a period of snow and very cold temperatures before Christmas, a late January snowstorm, and then an ice storm starting Jan. 30 that closed schools for five days and made traveling on the hilly streets of Eureka Springs streets treacherous—especially steep east-west corridors that get little sunlight in the winter.
“Every now and then, we will see ice storms,” National Weather Service meteorologist Pete Snyder said. “We don’t have them frequently, which is good.”
After staying in the high teens and low 20s in the daytime Jan. 30 and Jan. 31, it was 63° on Feb. 5 and 66° on Feb. 6, according to The Weather Channel. Snyder, stationed in Tulsa, said the big fluctuation in temperatures is par for the course in this area.
“We had an outbreak of polar air, temperatures plunged, that moved out, and then we got a return flow of warm air out of the west and southwest,” Snyder said. “The hilly terrain tends to have more rainfall and, in this case, more ice. The outlook for the rest of February is good. I don’t expect any real deviation from a normal February.”
Snyder said the sleet this area experienced is better than freezing rain. Freezing rain sticks to elevated surfaces like powerlines and trees, which can cause snapping lines, power outages, damage to buildings, injuries to people, and blocked roads.
Last summer there was a drought in July and August that caused major harm to local farmers and ranchers. The drought broke only to have a period later in the year when it dried up again.
“It is feast or famine when it comes to rainfall in Northwest Arkansas and Southeast Oklahoma,” Snyder said. “Spring is when we get most of our rainfall. Then we get periods when it is dry. Then it will come back, and we get a lot of rainfall. In this part of the country, rain is not as evenly distributed as on the Northeast and Northwest coasts. It makes the growing season more difficult.”
During the bad weather, the Eureka Springs Fire and EMS put out messages warning people that roads and sidewalks were already very slick with worsening conditions were to come.
“Reaching you (if possible) will be challenging and dangerous for our duty crew, volunteers and Eureka Springs Police officers,” EMS wrote in a Facebook post. “Thanks to our City of Eureka Springs Public Works crews for trying to improve the areas they can get to safely.”
Mayor Butch Berry said Eureka Springs is faced with the same challenges it’s had in the past 20 years when there is an ice storm – when ice gets packed down, nothing but an ice pick will break it up. The city’s narrow streets aren’t wide enough for a big snowplow and a snowplow isn’t effective at removing ice anyway. Some east-west corridors are too steep to plow and/or have too many immobile cars parked on the side of the road. The city did provide gravel and treatment with a liquid formula that helped on major roads.
The city just got a brand-new truck and snowplow on Jan. 30.
“Public Works drove to Kansas and brought down the new truck with a gravel spreader plus a plow,” Berry said. “That helped a lot on those major streets. The plow was going down the street and just scraping up the loose stuff, but it wouldn’t chip the ice. The plow is made for snow, not ice. People didn’t understand why we weren’t doing more. We don’t have the same equipment as the state highway department. I think we did a good job considering we had a thick, very slick covering of ice.”
Berry kept getting questions like, “Why don’t you plow Howell Street?” He said streets like Howell, Elk, Pine, Owen, and parts of Mountain are too steep to plow.
“Those [streets] you just have to wait for the weather to take care of it, which it eventually does,” Berry said. “People have to park at the top or the bottom of the street and walk up or down.” The same was true for the Victoria Woods apartment complex.
Berry said Public Works employees were on the job 24 hours a day during the ice emergency, and they slept at the new maintenance building on US 62. He mentioned that he was grateful the city had that building.