Jim Lambert was helping to manage the West Virginia Division of Highways’ response to Friday’s winter storm from “The Fishbowl.”
Inside a dark room fronted by a wall of glass at DOH headquarters, Lambert and other employees were fielding calls and email requests for roads to be treated and plowed. They were gathering weather data, monitoring 911 center logs and updating road conditions on the agency’s “West Virginia 511” website for travelers.
They also kept a close watch on dozens of video screens — linked to 110 cameras statewide — that transmitted live shots of roads.
“I’d like to see this thing just quit,” said Lambert, watching images of snow-covered roads and DOH plow trucks racing to clear them.
“The Fishbowl” — the nickname for the DOH Transportation Management Center — gets busy on days like Friday. Employees take calls about roads that need to be plowed and wrecks that need to be cleared. They relay the information to 10 DOH district offices and interstate garages across the state.
Next to nothing happens on a West Virginia highway without somebody in “The Fishbowl” knowing about it — and trying to help fix the problem.
“This is the hub,” said Brent Walker, a DOH spokesman who joined state Transportation Secretary Paul Mattox and other employees at the command center Friday while the storm roared through Charleston.
The center remains open seven days a week, 24 hours a day. At least three DOH employees stay on duty at all times. The center handles about 1,200 calls a day, but that number escalated Friday as the snow piled up.
“We get a whole hodgepodge of stuff,” Lambert said.
Like drivers behaving badly. On the video monitors, you could see cars speeding past DOH plow trucks on the unplowed lane of a four-lane highway. After a minor crash on the West Virginia Turnpike Friday that blocked the highway temporarily, several vehicles turned around and drove the wrong way — straight into other oncoming cars.
Overall, though, things could have been a lot worse.
“We’ve had a lot of fender benders, one rollover wreck, but for the most part we haven’t had any significant, major accidents,” Lambert said Friday afternoon. “Fortunately, traffic has been light. I think a lot of people heeded our warnings, took the day off and stayed home.”
And that made clearing the highways easier.
“Right now, they’re hitting the primary roads,” Lambert said. “Once the storm lets up, we’ll get the requests for treatment on the secondary roads. This is a very plowable snow because it’s a wet, heavy snow, not the dry, hard stuff that’s tough to scrape.”
For Lambert and “The Fishbowl” crew at DOH headquarters, it will be a long weekend. Someone had set up two cots in an adjacent office. They’ll sleep in shifts.
“I anticipate we’ll be dealing with this until Sunday,” Lambert said. “We’re pretty much here until the storm’s over.”
Reach Eric Eyre at ericeyre@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-4869 or follow @ericeyre on Twitter.