Valley City Cleans Up After 13 Inches of Snow

People say it's unusual to have so much snow this early in the season

VALLEY CITY, N.D. — Nearly 150 customers of Dakota Valley Electric are still without power after yesterday’s snowstorm that has people cleaning up from Lisbon to Grand Forks.

Valley City was spared major power outages, but they’ve been doing a lot of cleanup after 13 inches of snow.

“The street crews have the equipment all ready to go, they were ready to hop in there and take off pretty much,” Gary Jacobson, accountant for Valley City Public Works, said.

He says it’s not abnormal to have this amount of snow, but it is this early in the season.

A lot of tree branches around town came down. The Public Works Department says there were small outages where trees came down on power lines, but crews worked to restore those.

Even though the streets are cleared, officials still want people to be cautious of ice.

“They start with the major roads throughout the city and then they work by quadrants to try to clear up everything. They’ve been out since midnight, I think they’ve done a really good job of cleaning most of it up,” Jacobson said.

Many neighbors are out shoveling around their houses.

“This is my exercise, I have a snowblower but I’d rather shovel,” Leroy Frieze said.

Even though the city has already had to do a lot of cleanup, there are still some places that look like a winter wonderland, and that was a shock to some people who recently moved here.

“It’s 95 degrees in Scottsdale where I’m from, I’ve never seen snow this early in October,” Alexandero Valenzuela said.

He certainly has to do a lot more now that he’s in North Dakota.

“Everything changes. I’ve never had to scrape off my car before in my life. I’ve never had to use a heater in Arizona, it’s definitely a lot of changes here,” he said. “It does bother me. It takes up a lot of extra time that I didn’t have to deal with back home. There’s only one way to work through it guess, you have to do it somehow.”