Road crews are working overtime with snowplows and sanders to make driving safer, but lingering snow and subfreezing temperatures are conspiring to keep many streets alarmingly slick.

"The city, county and state are all out in full force," said Mary King of the Benton County Emergency Management Division.

"We have five snowplows with sanders out," said Jim Stouder of the Benton County Public Works Department. "We're spread pretty evenly through the county."

The county also had a number of smaller trucks spreading sand on ice-slicked roads, Stouder said.

"They'll hit their lifeline routes first and spread out from there," he said.

Corvallis Public Works employees also were focusing on key roads first.

"We started on the heavier routes, primarily at intersections," said Public Works Director Steve Rogers. "Now we're doing the more major routes on hills."

While the city has four snowplow-equipped dumptrucks at its disposal, it's sticking to sand for now.

"We chose not to do any plowing," Rogers said. "We did that for two reasons: One is there's not that much snow. The other is that underneath the snow is ice, and the snow is a lot safer to drive on."

Corvallis Transit System buses chained up and hit the roads as well, offering an option to people who wanted to leave their cars at home, although some routes were running a half-hour or more behind schedule.

"We're running all our regular routes. There are delays, obviously, but we haven't canceled any runs," said Tim Bates, the city's transit coordinator.

"We don't want our drivers going any faster than they're comfortable with," he added. "If we're late, we're late. That's not good, but we want to get there safe."

The winter storm hit Portland, Salem and Eugene harder than it did Corvallis and Albany, according to Joe Harwood, a spokesman for the Oregon Department of Transportation. But he warned that conditions in the mid-valley could get worse.

"Our biggest concern today is that we have a partial melt and then the temperatures drop again tonight," Harwood said. If that happens, he said, "you have a skating rink."

Harwood said that ODOT crews would continue to focus first on keeping Interstate 5 driveable, followed by state highways 20, 34 and 99. The department will use chemical de-icer on stretches of highway that are clear of snow, but otherwise it will have to stick with sanding and plowing.

"The best advice we can give people out there is if you don't have to drive, don't," Harwood said. "If you do have to drive, tire chains are a good idea. That's about the only thing that can give you traction when the roads get real slick."

The first Benton County road crews rolled out at 7 p.m. Sunday as snow began to pile up at higher elevations and temperatures began to plummet overnight.

"We had a small crew out last night, and we relieved them at 7 o'clock this morning," Stouder said Monday. "We'll go into 12-hour shifts, and we can keep it up quite awhile."

City workers hit the road at 4 a.m. Monday, and they were also looking at pulling some overtime.

"My guess is that we'll have slippery driving conditions for the rest of the week," Rogers said. "In fact, the forecast is looking pretty bad through Christmas."

Bennett Hall can be reached at 758-9529 or bennett.hall@lee.net.