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Salt ordered. Equipment checked. Plows ready?

Check!

Even if slippery conditions haven't been striking this November, the Town of Mount Airy is ready for them.

"You do every once in a while get occasional snow around Thanksgiving," said Mark Moxley, the town's superintendent of Streets and Roads. "It's all ready to go. ... When you get into October you're ready."

Moxley is the watchman for the town, making the call on when the sleet turns to ice or a dusting of snow turns into a more substantial weather event.

"I have to keep an eye on the weather, that's my job and that's what I've done 29 winters," said Moxley, who joked about losing sleep during cold weather while checking radar and weather.

"If they call for ice I have my men out there. ... If it's calling for snow, I don't call the whole plowing crew in until there's about two inches of snow," he said.

Besides making the call for salting or plowing, Moxley also decides who on the 13-man crew comes out.

He said on average it takes about four hours to cover 46 miles of road for the town with 10 plow trucks. And if Mother Nature is persistent, it can be a long shift.

Weather doesn't wait for weekends or days off. "It doesn't make a difference if it's a holiday, it still snows," he said.

Moxley has worked Christmas three times in his tenure with the town.

This will be Mount Airy's first full winter with a recently built salt storage shed. Moxley said the old shed used to have a capacity for about 120 tons of salt.

"This shed we have now, we have 580 tons in it. ... We can store up to 1,000 tons," he said. "It makes it nice in the wintertime."

The project, a salt-shed building with four storage bins, was the first phase in a four-part project that could also include other improvements, such as storm water management, construction of a maintenance building and paving.

Barney Quinn, the town's engineer, said phase two of the project has been started with some excavation and the beginning of a concrete foundation for a maintenance building. The previous facility's wooden walls were inadequate for the pressure of storing large amounts of salt.

Whether the end of November turns out warm or cold, holiday wreaths are going up this week.

Kelly Ziad, town planner and Main Street manager, said the decorations usually go up the week before Thanksgiving. The brand-new wreaths were funded with a grant through the Main Street Improvement Program through the state, and power is donated by Allegheny Power, who was prepping this week for the wreaths.

Ziad said the old holiday decorations were about 15 or 16 years old. This past summer, the Main Street Association and some downtown merchants weighed in on the new decorations, and the new circles of greenery, outfitted with three candles and a red ribbon will soon be adorning lampposts for the first time.