ELMORE — Two consecutive mild winters meant little to the inspectors who checked out snowplow trucks at the Ohio Turnpike maintenance garage near Elmore on Friday morning.
“We’re still prepared for whatever northwest Ohio brings us,” Jeff Landel, the Western Division superintendent for the Ohio Turnpike and Infrastructure Commission’s maintenance operations, said during the inspection.
The turnpike has 103 trucks distributed among its eight garages, which are spaced at roughly 30-mile intervals across the 241-mile highway.
In between roadway maintenance assignments and occasional dispatches to crash scenes, those garages’ workers perform annual upkeep on the trucks to get them ready for snow and ice.
Mechanics and supervisors from elsewhere on the turnpike then check behind during the annual preseason inspection tour, which started earlier in the week on the turnpike’s east end before proceeding to the Kunkle and Swanton garages west of Toledo on Thursday and concluded Friday afternoon at the Castalia garage.