Warren County was under a winter weather advisory and a hazardous weather outlook for Thursday.

The National Weather Service had warnings and advisories out over much of the state.

Warren County was at the western edge of the forecast area. Across the state, schools and entities in the middle of the projected storm, and those that are less accustomed to winter weather than Warren County, shut down operations ahead of the storm.

Facing a forecast of freezing rain and icy conditions, Warren County School District officials made the same call Thursday morning.

“The decision to delay or cancel school is not taken lightly,” Transportation Manager Mike Kiehl said. “Living in a lake effect snow region, with ever-changing forecasts, requires constant monitoring of weather forecasts to anticipate future weather conditions.”

Thursday was an early morning for Kiehl.

“Starting in the late fall and throughout the winter, a wintry forecast will require that the district’s transportation manager get up at 3:30 a.m. to drive a selection of county roads and get a feel for road conditions,” he said. ” The size of the district means that all roads can’t be covered, but the road selection includes those at higher elevations, with different surfaces, and different locations in the county.”

He has about an hour to check roads. Starting around 5 a.m., Kiehl seeks information from other experts – “PennDOT, Emergency Response Center, bus contractors, etc. to get their professional opinions on road and weather conditions in the different areas of the county,” he said.

“The goal is to use all of this information to guide the superintendent in making a decision on whether school should be delayed or canceled by 5:15 a.m.”

Some of the buses are on the road by 6 a.m. Drivers, students, and parents on those routes need as much lead time as they can get.

“On Thursday, the forecast called for freezing rain and icy conditions starting around 5 a.m.,” Kiehl said. That meant he couldn’t witness what road conditions would be like when the buses would be on them.

The district moved forward with a two-hour delay “to allow road treatments to occur and to see how the weather system developed.”

“It was clear by 6:30 a.m. that the forecast was accurate and most of the county was experiencing freezing rain,” he said. “Icy conditions are often more concerning than snowy conditions when considering the safety of our students, leading to the decision to cancel school at roughly 6:45 a.m.”

The delay and cancellation processes worked, but the district’s communications hit snags Thursday morning.

“At 5:12 a.m., the district created a message on its new communication platform to inform stakeholders of the initial decision to delay,” Superintendent Amy Stewart said in a release. “The new platform is designed to send an email and text message to the contact information in our databases. It is also designed to post a message on the district’s mobile app, its website, and Facebook.”

“The new platform was tested several times in the early fall but, in this instance, it failed to send messages to approximately half of the established contact list,” Stewart said.

The district is working to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

“The district contacted its vendor for support,” Stewart said. “After spending the morning reviewing the data and the two attempts by the district to send its messages, the application vendor informed us that there was a data conversion error on their end when they initially prepared our data for import into their system. That error resulted in a large number of contacts being unreadable by their system.”

“The district worked with the vendor to ensure that all data is readable in the system,” she said. “All call lists were reviewed by the vendor to confirm the phone numbers are mapped appropriately. In the meantime, residents may expect to receive one or more test messages so we can verify that the problem has been resolved.”

There are five energy days built into the district’s 2022-2023 calendar.

Energy days are days on which school will not be held unless they are needed to make up for days lost to weather or other events.

The first of the energy days to be used, according to the calendar, is Friday, May 26. Because of Thursday’s cancellation, that day is now a regular school day. The next snow day would be exchanged for April 10, then Feb. 20, March 13, and finally April 6.

There were some weather-related calls in the county on Thursday.

According to Public Safety Director Ken McCorrison, there were three vehicle crashes and one report of lines down – not as bad as the advance warning had led officials to expect, but “it was pretty icy up on the hills,” he said.

He advised that people exercise caution on the roads and be aware of changing conditions. “When it starts getting cold, it could get pretty slick,” McCorrison said.

The advisory ends at 7 a.m. Friday, Dec. 16. The forecast from that point calls for a chance of rain or snow Friday, and a chance of snow with temperatures below freezing Friday night, Saturday, and Sunday.