OMAHA, Neb. (KMTV) — Wind, slick roads — oh, the first taste of winter.
"It is not my cup of tea. I much rather prefer warmer weather, but that's what you get in the Midwest," said Katelynn Dilts, a Papillion resident.
You may not be a fan of winter, like Katelynn, but maybe you are like Matthew.
"I love the cold, yeah. I mean, I am more of a winter person than a summer person," said Matthew Bauer, a Bellevue resident.
Regardless, with a morning of freezing rain, the roads were slick but the city said they were prepared.
"The first thing we did today was we sent our crews and we had about 75 trucks out that have been out today and we salted some bridges just to make sure we didn't get that flash freeze right at rush hour," said Austin Rowser, capitol construction and street maintenance engineer with the City of Omaha.
Omaha Public Works had its full crew working the roads at 3:30 a.m. on Tuesday morning and spent the rest of the morning spreading salt on slick areas.
"Our whole fleet when we bring in everybody and all of our forces, we are running about a 100 to 125 pieces of equipment," said Rowser.
When they are needed in residential areas, which is when snow is more than 2 inches, the city will call in contracted snow plows.
"We generally bring those contractors in so that we can stay working on major and secondary streets and get some early service on those streets early on in the storm," said Rowser.
Public works wasn't the only team out today, OPPD had a busy day.
"For OPPD we had 7,700 customers without power at the height of this event," said Jason Kuiper, an OPPD spokesperson.
Kuiper said almost all of the outages were caused by what they call galloping lines.
"Lines get moving, they can hit each other and that can cause them to short out or, in a lot of the cases, we were seeing it was actually damaging the polls," Kuiper said.
OPPD wants people to remember: if you are experiencing an outage, report it. Give crew space if you see them out working and be patient.
As for Matthew, he said to keep in mind that this is Nebraska.
"Well, the thing about Nebraska is that you can experience all four seasons in a single day," Bauer said.
OPPD was planning on having all outages fixed by the end of the day Tuesday.
Some of the best advice 3 News Now Reporter Molly Hudson received for conditions like this was to dress warm, drive slow and plan ahead.
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