Ever since 2014, the term “polar vortex” has become widely known and used to describe a period of frigid weather during the winter. The Elizabethtown College community recently endured another polar vortex, with snowfall from Tuesday, Jan. 29 to Thursday, Jan. 31 and the proceeding days of cold weather. According to professor of biology Dr. Thomas Murray, the polar vortex occurs when lobes of cold air move south from the Arctic. There is a mass of cold air spinning around the Arctic, which Murray described like a “merry-go-round,” and pieces of cold air can break from that mass and travel south, affecting areas like the Midwest and the East Coast.

According to a piece in The New York Times, researchers say that the polar vortex phenomenon is occurring more often. Winters have also gradually shortened with time, but winters now have more intense periods of cold, frequently due to these lobes breaking from the mass of air above the Arctic.

Snowstorms have become popularly linked with the polar vortex. The recent weather brought a good bit of snow to Etown, with the snow and the ice being enough for the campus to close Tuesday, Jan. 29. With snow and frigid temperatures comes some hazardous conditions, especially to a college campus. Roads and walkways can become slippery from ice, which can pose a problem for residential students who must walk to class, commuter students who have to drive to class and faculty and staff who also have to commute to campus. Facilities Management works to keep the campus as safe as possible during inclement weather through their cleaning methods.

How Facilities cleans the roads is dependent on the storm. Normally, however, they pre-treat the roads if the temperature is right to keep the snow melting during the storm and salt for ice, and they rely on the sun as much as possible to melt the ice and snow.

They also tailor the equipment they have on campus to the storm. Facilities also relies on different crews during the storm: Environmental Services, shoveling and grounds crews all work together. They target the center of the campus first before branching out from there to the ends of campus. If the snow is heavy, Facilities will call an excavating company to bring in bigger pieces of equipment to use to clean the lots.

In the case of the snowstorm Tuesday, Jan. 29, there were very minimal projections for the storm, and the roads were pre-treated the night before. Facilities workers were working until around 8 p.m. that night to keep cleaning the roads. Because of the nature of the storm and how slippery the roads were becoming, Facilities decided that the best way of cleaning was through letting the snow accumulate on the roads to provide more traction.

“Unfortunately snow removal like that is just so hard on the guys, because they’re out there and trying to remove snow and not damage any equipment,” Assistant Director of Facilities Management Dallas Stahlman said.

“It’s pretty intense on your nerves.”

The road conditions during that snowstorm and the days following were still dangerous. Posts from students on the E-town Jays app Friday, Feb. 1 expressed their concerns and frustrations from classes not being cancelled when the roads were so slippery.

“It’s usually not a Facilities-driven decision whether we close or delay,” Director of Facilities Management Mark Zimmerman said. Facilities is consulted in addition to other representative groups on-and off-campus to determine whether the College closes or delays opening.

“Ultimately it comes down to safety,” Zimmerman said. “The bottom line is…we say, ‘is the campus going to be safe for us to travel?’”

“Trying to out-guess the weatherman is what we’re trying to do most of the time,” Stahlman said.

Facilities uses straight road rock salt when treating roads and walkways. Previously, they used to use a different brand, which was mixed with malt, but it was very costly and did not do much different than the regular rock salt. The other products used are limited, including calcium chloride and cinders. There is a concern with how rock salt will affect water quality when it gets washed away into lakes or streams, according to an article by Slate.com. Zimmerman said that the products they use are probably the least aggressive.

“There are a lot of ice-melters that they’ll say it’s guaranteed to work until zero [degrees]- that’s when you’re really getting into the harsher chemicals,” Stahlman said.

“We’re not using those types of materials.”

“A lot of our campus drains into Lake Placida, so we’re very careful with Lake Placida,” Zimmerman said. “We keep a pretty close tab on water quality there with the biology department.”

“Students in the biology department do routinely monitor the lake and stream and the wetlands on campus,” Murray said. He added that they look at water quality, nutrients in the water, algae control and the turtle population during those tests.

“If anything significant is found we do share that with Facilities,” Murray said. “They’ve done a great job maintaining Lake Placida and creating habitat for the fish and turtles.”

The alternatives to road salt experimented with in other parts of the country come with varying levels of success and drawbacks. According to an article by the Montreal Gazette, beet juice, cheese brine, pickle brine and fracking waste water are all alternatives that are experimented with but come with drawbacks such as smell, stickiness and adverse environmental effects.