The Montgomery County area had its first major winter storm in three years on Jan. 5, causing problems for residents and motorists.

Several businesses were closed, schools from the Montgomery County and Wellsville-Middletown districts were shut down for in-person learning and roads from Middletown to Rhineland were covered with snow.

Still, county officials were quick to applaud the efforts from the Road and Bridge department.

“They know that people want to get where they need to go,” 1st District Commissioner Dave Teeter said. “They know emergency vehicles need to get where they need to go. So they do the best they can as quickly as they can. In a lot of cases, most people appreciate it.”

2nd District Commissioner Doug Lensing, who lives in Rhineland, said the storm made it difficult for him to come to work because of the snow-covered roads in the southern part of the county.

“Highway 94 between Rhineland and Highway 19 and east of Highway 19 have really not been touched,” Lensing said. “It took me an extra 10 minutes to get here.”

Road and Bridge supervisor Jeremiah Strube said trying to clean off the roads during the first two days of the storm was a challenge for him and his staff, which has 16 full-time employees.

“Everything that we did on Sunday had to be redone Monday morning because of all of that drifting Sunday night,” Strube said.

Strube said his staff got prepared for the storm about three days in advance.

“We started getting everything suited up and went for a test run and get everything ready on Thursday,” Strube said. “So on Thursday and Friday, we have that two-day window to make sure everything is ready. We can’t really pretreat anything like MoDOT because we don’t do salt. We just do cinders. MoDOT was out pretreating on Saturday and I was actually shocked at how much pretreating they were doing. I saw them on Highway A. I have never seen them go that far out.”

More snow fell in the county on Jan. 10, causing businesses and schools to close.

Montgomery County wasn’t the only area in the state that wasn’t hit by the storm, which was known as Winter Storm Blair. Sections of I-70 in Missouri were closed due to snow and ice. Flights were canceled at airports in Kansas City and St. Louis. There were over 30,000 power outages in Missouri.