Photo by Scott McCloskey City of Wheeling Operations Department employee Bill Caldwell removes snow from a sidewalk on the Washington Avenue Bridge Wednesday morning.

As local maintenance crews were out treating area roads and sidewalks for the first time this year Wednesday morning following a sudden light snowfall, city and state officials said they are well prepared for the winter season.

Wheeling Public Works Director Russell “Rusty” Jebbia said the city’s operations department is ready to handle the elements. He said the city has plenty of salt and cinder supplies and the city trucks and equipment are “ready to go.”

“There’s no problem there (with salt supplies), because we had such a mild startup so far this year,” Jebbia explained. He said the city’s salt shed has been nearly full since this past summer. “We had it restocked since last year. So we were ready for this. … We had all our equipment ready to go and we’ve had plenty of time to get stuff prepared.”

Jebbia said crews have only had to apply salt a few times to city streets and there hasn’t been a need to use cinders yet.

“We’ve been out probably three or four times this year just with some light icing. … So we’ve had crews out early on, but we just haven’t had any kind of snow issue to deal with yet. So we are in good shape with our salt supplies,” Jebbia added.

West Virginia Division of Highways District 6 Maintenance Engineer Tony Clark echoed Jebbia’s comments, saying the early mild winter weather has left his department in “pretty good” shape with salt supplies and equipment.

“We are generally ready to go. … We are as well-prepared as we can be,” he said.

Officials with the National Weather Service in Pittsburgh said while more light snow is expected in the Wheeling/Pittsburgh area by this weekend, it is still too early to predict how the storm will track and more specific snowfall amounts. They said while heavier snow is predicted for the southern region of West Virginia, if the storm pushes further north than expected there is the potential to see more significant accumulation in the area by Saturday evening.