Colorado Springs received its first winter snow of the season beginning Sunday night. Now the city is preparing to respond to the first extended storm.

The National Weather Service has issued a winter weather advisory for Colorado Springs and El Paso County between 2 a.m. and 8 p.m. on Wednesday. The most recent forecast Tuesday afternoon called for the region to receive between three and six inches of snow, although the northern part of the county could see as much as nine inches.

Corey Farkas, operations and maintenance manager for Colorado Springs’ Public Works department, said that Tuesday was a day for the snow response crews to rest and check on the plows in between clearing the previous snowfall and preparing for Wednesday. Farkas said the timing for the early snow would matter a lot.

“The first chunk is supposed to start happening right at rush hour, which is very difficult for us. Our plows, like everyone else, can get caught in rush hour traffic,” Farkas said.

Farkas asked that people avoid driving as much as they can while it’s snowing tomorrow. Drivers should keep their distance from snowplows and be prepared to take it slow and brake early.

The city’s full response includes between 40 and 45 snowplow drivers, along with other public works personnel. The plows will focus on clearing the primary arterial roads to keep the major transportation routes open across Colorado Springs. Once those are consistently clear, drivers will move onto the secondary connector roads and any neighborhoods that receive more than six inches of snow.

Farkas said that while he would like to have up to 60 drivers, that would still not be enough to clear all of Colorado Springs quickly. Wednesday’s storm could see more than half an inch of snow falling per hour.

“There is just no current way for us to keep up with that. The city is just too large and has too much infrastructure. If we had 300 plows, we couldn’t keep up with that,” Farkas said.

If predictions hold, Colorado Springs will not be the hardest-hit area of southern Colorado during the storm. The National Weather Service in Pueblo and KOAA Meteorologist Alan Rose said there could be as much as nine inches of snow in the Palmer Divide and up to 11 inches in Beulah and Rye southwest of Pueblo.

After a day of freezing temperatures, the forecast shows a high of around 39 degrees on Thursday and 44 degrees on Friday. Farkas said the plows would likely still be working at that point, depending on how many cycles of de-ice melting and freezing have hardened the snow.