Here at the Times-Republican, we do our best to put out a newspaper full of local news, sports, briefs and opinions six days a week and cover as much as we possibly can within Marshall County and our greater coverage area. We’re also Iowans and Marshalltonians, and we know too well that trying to fight the weather often ends in a losing battle.

With Tuesday night’s special election results pending, we did our best to get yesterday’s paper finished as early as we could in hopes of beating the impending blizzard and getting to the post office in time. But alas, it wasn’t to be, and for the safety of our drivers, we made the difficult decision to delay delivery and make the e edition available on our website at no charge.

So for those of you who receive your T-R in the mail, you’ll be getting two today, and we hope you can understand the calculations that went into this.

On a brighter note, we’d like to say a hearty thank you to all of our area road crews, first responders, Alliant utility workers (who restored power after an outage on the north side of town Tuesday evening) and other important professionals who work through rain or shine, snow or sleet, and everything in between. The roads in Marshalltown were cleared out and easy to travel for most of the day, and Police Chief Chris Jones reported that there was only a single accident within city limits yesterday.

The rest of the county wasn’t quite as peaceful, as Sheriff Joel Phillips reported 11 disabled vehicles and seven vehicle crashes between midnight and 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday primarily caused by high winds and icy road conditions. Fortunately, no one was hurt, which is especially relieving to hear after the devastating fatal accident on Tuesday afternoon at the Highway 30/330 interchange before the storm had hit.

“Roads are improving with IDOT and the Marshall County Secondary Roads Department continuing to remove snow and ice in many locations. Wind speeds are still high causing some low visibility conditions in rural areas,” Phillips said.

Nonetheless, we aren’t totally out of the water yet, and we could see more snow in the next few days. As always, if you have to drive, drive safe and slow, and if you don’t have to drive, stay home and bundle up with a good book or that Netflix series you’ve been putting off watching for too long.

Our heartfelt thanks go out to everyone who kept Marshalltown and Marshall County running through a challenging winter weather situation.