ST. LOUIS – More than 48 hours after the last flurries fell in St. Louis, cleanup work was still underway Wednesday in Soulard.

“This year is a bit more tricky,” Greg Laine said.

Laine has lived in Soulard for more than a decade. He knows the perils of a snow-covered side street in the city.

“There’s a bunch of ice under the snow, which isn’t helping,” he said. “Both of my vehicles are currently stuck because of ice.”

Conner Kerrigan, a spokesperson for St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones, reaffirmed the city’s snowplow protocol on Wednesday.

“Since this winter storm started, we’ve had trucks running around the clock. Folks are working in these 12-hour shifts,” he said.

“Primarily, we work on the arterials. That’s kind of the first thing that we’re trying to get done that helps, you know, emergency vehicles move and that kind of thing. Then we move on to the secondary [roads]. We also do some of the hill streets in the city, because you see a lot of snow impact there.”

When it comes to residential streets?

“We do not plow the residential streets, and a big reason for that is because of the cars,” Kerrigan said. “When there’s cars parked on both sides of the street, we can’t get our trucks down there without burying cars in the snow.”

Kerrigan said that could change in the not-so-distant future.

“The good news is that we’ve spent $375,000 of ARPA funds to get three new chassis for the plows that are small enough to get down those residential streets,” he said.

The new plows won’t arrive until March and will require some assembly before they’re road-ready, Kerrigan said.

“It’s going to be really exciting to have these new tools at our disposal, and I’m sure that having them is going to alter the way that we approach plowing the city,” he said.

That’s good news for people who live on side streets, right?

“Potentially. There’s three. How soon will each neighborhood get hit and like, priority-wise and whatnot?” Laine said. “So, good news, yes; but not great, I guess.”