Salem plans network improvements to fix traffic cameras kept offline during storm
The city of Salem will re-engineer the network supporting its traffic cameras after outages left residents without a clear picture of road conditions during an ice storm.
Camera outages caused city webpages and the state’s Tripcheck website to display out-of-date images showing roads with less snow and ice last weekend.
The city operates a network of 23 traffic cameras at major intersections around Salem, in addition to some cameras operated by the Oregon Department of Transportation on state roads.
By Monday, the city had replaced the out-of-date images with a graphic showing the cameras were having technical difficulties.
Jill Neely, a south Salem resident, said she relies on the camera at South Liberty Road and Kuebler Boulevard in bad weather to see if she can safely visit her disabled mother, who lives about a half-mile away.
“Since the camera near my home wasn’t working I was reluctant to try to visit her for five days, as I could not see beyond my neighborhood what the streets looked like,” Neely said in an email to Salem Reporter. She said other residents posted on social media that they relied on outdated camera images to show conditions when leaving home in the storm, then had difficulty getting back safely.
The city’s camera issues have been intermittent for at least a year but have gotten progressively worse since November, said Trevor Smith, public works department spokesman.
“Over the last several years the city’s traffic management system has been expanding with additional cameras and other traffic control devices. This has created a situation where the demands of those devices is overloading the capacity of the system and causing periodic outages for the camera network,” Smith said in an email.
That came to a head over the weekend, when Salem was hit with snow, sleet and freezing rain, and the cameras became among the most-viewed pages on the city’s website.
Smith said the city’s IT and traffic workers don’t have a timeline for when the network will be fixed and cameras reliably back online.
Storm response
City officials said Thursday they were proud of Salemites for taking the storm seriously.
“We had few issues because people stayed home and off the roads. Emergency services weren’t overwhelmed,” Smith said. “That really shows that the city listened and took it seriously.”
Public works crews drove 6,257 miles during the storm — greater than the distance of a roundtrip from Portland to New York City.
Crews worked 24 hours per day in 12-hour shifts for days, driving eight snow and sand plows, and one light-duty plow. They treated 3,060 miles of road — about the distance of a round trip on Interstate 5 from Vancouver, British Columbia to the Mexican border and back.
Smith gave the following statistics for the city’s storm response:
- 3,245 gallons of deicer applied directly to the roadway
- 1,000 gallons of deicer applied to sanding rock to create “hot loads” (coating sanding gravel in deicer, allowing it to burn its way into the ice)
- 1,000 gallons of deicer delivered to the city of Dallas over the course of the event
- 406 total lane miles of roadway directly treated with deicer
- 141 loads of sand applied to the roadways
- About 1,692 cubic yards of sanding rock
- 2,529 lane miles of roadway treated with sanding rock
Emergency services
Salem’s emergency dispatchers received reports of about 25 car crashes in the city from Friday, Jan. 12, through Wednesday, Jan. 17.
Joe Hutchinson, the city’s emergency manager, said there was an uptick in emergency calls, mostly for issues like cars in ditches, but nothing out of the ordinary for the type of weather Salem saw.
Police found one man dead in a tent in central Salem Tuesday morning from what appeared to be carbon monoxide poisoning. The man and his partner had been running a propane heater in their tent to stay warm in freezing temperatures, police said.
City emergency services and homeless service providers said Thursday they weren’t aware of any other deaths related to the storm.
Contact reporter Rachel Alexander: [email protected] or 503-575-1241.
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Rachel Alexander is Salem Reporter’s managing editor. She joined Salem Reporter when it was founded in 2018 and covers education, economic development and a little bit of everything else. She’s been a journalist in Oregon and Washington for over a decade and is a past president of Oregon's Society of Professional Journalists chapter. Outside of work, you can often find her gardening or with her nose buried in a book.
