Amir Mott is director of the 88th Civil Engineer Group, leading a team responsible for much of the infrastructure at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, a sprawling, two-area base with 38,000 military and civilian employees, 9.4 square miles of improved grounds, more than 700 miles of utility systems with a plant replacement value of $14.9 billion.
Mott and his 650-member team are responsible for construction, fire protection, maintenance and repair of more than 600 facilities across nearly 18 square miles.
“It’s a very large undertaking, what our snow team is out there doing,” Mott told the Dayton Daily News Monday. “Typically, with a normal snow, we get two to four inches. Even that is a lot of snow and it can take all day to clear it, particularly when you’re talking about the airfield that we’re dealing with, all the primary and secondary roads, the large magnitude of parking lots.”
The National Weather Service’s Wilmington office said a record daily maximum snowfall was set in the Dayton area Sunday of 12.4 inches, followed by dangerously cold temperatures Monday morning. Parts of Beavercreek near the base saw more than 14 inches, the service said.
Some sections of the base saw more than a foot of snow, Mott said. “That’s a significant increase in volume above what we normally see.”
The base was closed to all but essential personnel Monday. Base leaders decided the installation would similarly be closed to all but mission-essential personnel and medical appointments Tuesday.
But the base will be fully operational Wednesday, the wing said on Facebook Monday night.
A key part of the challenge is familiar to municipal snow crews — and even residents trying to shovel out a driveway or clear a parking spot on a street.
“Where do you stack all that snow?” Mott said. “Because that snow has to be stacked somewhere. We’ve got mounds of snow, and that just takes a lot of time.”
Simply finding a place to put the snow stretches the process out, but he said base crews were doing a “fantastic job.”
It was too soon to talk about definite timelines Monday afternoon. Leadership convened Sunday evening, Monday morning and was scheduled to keep meeting, Mott said.
88th Air Base Wing leaders will assess roads and parking lots and how much remains to be done.
It’s not necessarily unusual to close the airfield in the winter, Mott said. “In this particular case, we had to close it a little bit longer because there was so much snow. And not only that, when you have wind conditions that create snow drifts, particularly with the snow as light as it is ... the wind is just whipping it around.”
Wind gusts were expected Monday evening until early Tuesday afternoon, he said.
The base is helping other installations, too. On Friday, the 88th Civil Engineer Squadron and 88th Logistics Readiness Squadron loaded and flew a massive snow broom machine to Joint Base Andrews in the Washington, D.C. area aboard one of the 445th Airlift Wing’s C-17s, the wing reported on Facebook.
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