ELYRIA TOWNSHIP, Ohio — The Lorain County Sheriff's Office is changing the way it declares snow emergencies. The sheriff's office will move away from traditional county-wide alerts you might be familiar with that use the Level 1, 2, and 3 system.
"This was a Buckeye State Sheriff's Association system that they created back in the 70s. We're looking at modernizing it and possibly making changes to it statewide," said Lorain County Sheriff Jack Hall.
The county will join 10 others across Ohio in adopting a 2-tier system that provides alerts specific to communities impacted by winter weather.
"By taking the level out of it and making it specific, we can now call those advisories or those bans to very finite or specific areas of the county that only affect those areas," said Hall.
Lorain County spans a large area, and conditions can be dangerous in some locations while remaining safe in others. Under the new process, officials will issue either a snow emergency advisory or a travel ban.
A snow emergency advisory serves as an early warning, urging drivers to use caution and limit travel when they can. A travel ban is serious, closing roads to emergency traffic only until conditions improve.
"If we call a travel ban, that's a very serious situation, when those local subdivisions advise me that they cannot clear the roadway even for a single car to go through there, so the roadway is absolutely impassable, and it's affecting their entire community," said Hall.
Gov. DeWine said each county in Ohio is responsible for its own alerts and how it issues them. For example, in Lake County, the sheriff's office doesn't issue any snow emergency levels. The office said it will post current conditions and warnings, but it will never make the call to close down roads because it could impact businesses.
For the new two-tier alert system, the Lorain County sheriff's office said it will issue alerts as it always does, through us here at News 5, through social media, and through their free mobile app.
"I know sometimes people are concerned that if I have to drive from point A to point B and there's been a jurisdiction which has been declared under travel ban, we're going to make sure that we assist the public in providing detour information, how to safely get around those areas and roadways that would be plowed better then the area that the band exists in," said Hall.
