Sampson blanketed in snow

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SAMPSON COUNTY — The expectations for snow were fulfilled this past weekend as white blanketed yards, buildings and roads here and all across the state.

The snow event, which happened late Friday night and into Saturday morning, was the most in one event in years.

Highs for the snow reached upwards to five inches across parts of central North Carolina, including Sampson. In the neighboring county of Cumberland there was as much as 4.5 inches of snow total. Reports from WRAL noted in Raleigh, by midnight on that Friday, an inch and a half of snow had already fallen.

With that much snow coming down Sampson County wasn’t left out of the storm. While Sampson did get snow, around 3 inches or more, the storm brought a combination of snow, rain and sleet. Temperatures for the weekend reached a low of 17 degrees and with the freezing rain came plenty of black ice.

While roads were frozen over for a time, and some secondary roads were still trouble areas on Sunday and Monday, Keith Jackson, maintenance engineer for N.C. Department of Transportation in Sampson, said those roads were getting the attention they needed.

“We’re wrapping it up today (Monday) and we’ll be pretty much done by the end of the day,” he said. “Afterwards we’ll have another day of clean up of our equipment. It’s a pretty elongated time from the start of the planning and preparations, to the action and then the clean up but we’ll have it finished soon.”

“All primary roads are now clean,” Jackson continued. “There were some icy spots that popped up where some melted sleet froze back over on some of the secondary roads, and there’s still potential for that in the early mornings, but we’ve pretty much got them cleaned off too. Now it’s just a matter of getting the roads dry, but overall we did great.”

Something also of note is that even with all the precipitation, Sgt. Kevin Person from North Carolina Highway Patrol highlighted that no major accidents were reported this past weekend.

“I first have to say that DOT did an excellent job on prepping the roads before hand,” he said. “We had very little collisions, there were some stranded motorist and maybe a vehicle in the ditch but anything that’s of a severe nature, we had nothing,

“That’s just unprecedented for this county so needless to say I was very pleased, Pearson added.”

Pearson also highlighted that not only were there no major roadway incidents, but there were little to no reports of power outages, downed trees and other related issues.

“There was nothing widespread; we had maybe a couple downed tree and limbs but this event, in my opinion, was really uneventful and not that bad,” Pearson said. “I know that during the storm I don’t think there was a single power outage anywhere. I think Sunday night there was some around the Midway area, but we don’t know if that was equipment malfunction or not but for right now it’s unknown if it was even weather related.”

“Regardless, everyone worked together on the storm, us, DOT and we worked together with all our partner agencies,” he added. “Thanks to all the hard work this weekends storm was very uneventful for us and that was a blessing.”