Department of Public Works Deputy Director Michael Olson stands in front of nearly 20 feet of salt at the city of Ferndale’s salt barn on Cambourne Street.
By: Mike Koury | Woodward Talk | Published December 15, 2025
FERNDALE/BERKLEY — The snowfall hit southeast Michigan a bit earlier than some cities anticipated, but Ferndale and Berkley were ready to battle the inclement weather.
While it wasn’t a heavy snowfall, the concerns about the weather last week were enough to cancel school for the day on Dec. 10.
Department of Public Works Director James Jameson said on Dec. 12 that the department had been getting ready for the snow for a while, but in the past several years, the city hadn’t been hit with snow this early into the winter season.
Jameson stated that Ferndale usually isn’t at 100% readiness until later in the winter season and that the DPW was still doing curbside leaf pickup until two weeks ago, so some of the trucks they use for plowing were in use for leaves.
“We’ve always got kind of a staggered fleet at that point in time,” he said. “And then this week, we had extra snow coming. With the snow that we got the previous week, we were trying to convert as much as possible to snow and ice maintenance fleet. So, we’re pretty good on that. We’re actually pretty much at 100% readiness now, but typically that would not really even be necessary until closer to Christmas in a regular year.”
Berkley Superintendent of Public Works Adam Wozniak said the city monitors the weather as it develops and tries to have its vehicles ready the season before.
“Our mechanics are like a season ahead of going forward. So, if it’s leaf season, they’re already prepped and ready for our winter maintenance trucks to be ready for the wintertime, and then when the wintertime hits, they’re prepped and ready for springtime.”
According to Jameson, Ferndale has 2,000 tons of salt in its barn, but the city can order more if needed. He believes they didn’t lay down any salt last winter until January.
Likewise, Wozniak said Berkley has 2,000 tons of salt, which can fill 10 truckloads and that they share with Huntington Woods and the Berkley School District.
“For a normal snowfall, no, we’re not going through that much salt,” Wozniak said. “It’s just good to have that much in stock in hand just in case we do have one of those long, lingering storms.”
As far as how his workers handled the weather on Dec. 10, Jameson said it went well, though they had to declare a snow emergency one to two hours before they had to get cars off the street.
“That’s not ideal, but when it happens it’s because conditions have changed rapidly,” he said. “In this case, we had about a four-hour window with which we would have had to plow every residential street. And the reason we declared it is because we knew that if we didn’t plow those streets, because of the temperature going up and then coming back down, it would have flash froze and then it would have made it impossible for us to clear the ice off the streets after that, because you can’t really plow ice. You plow snow and slush.”
Wozniak’s crew got word around midnight on Dec. 10 that the weather was going to hit. For the first part of it he said they were shoving snow off their major roads and applying salt. When the snow started to fall harder, they stopped with the salt and just focused on scraping away all the snow.
“You do your salt routes and plow routes that, once you do one route, you kind of circle around and hit it again and hit it again until once snow finally does taper down, then you can start reapplying salt again,” he said. “We really didn’t use much salt, but we still plow. We were out there trying to keep the roads safe for everybody.”