BALTIMORE (WJZ) — The first winter blast of the year continues to present challenges for area residents and road crews.

As Meteorologist Tim Williams reports, we’ll all be going through a familiar drill for the next couple of days.

It took a while to get here, but the sights and sounds are familiar. Now Marylanders like Susan Patterson are reacting to iced-over side streets and cars left over by 2012′s first winter storm.

“It’s all ice. I warmed it up for a while thinking that maybe that would help melt it a little bit and it didn’t really help much,” Patterson said.

In anticipation, city and state transportation crews were well prepared for the worst, but the challenges of treating secondary roads is ongoing into the work week.

“Some areas that were more ice-covered down to the south and there were more areas with more snowfall with ice on top of it up to our north, so somewhere in between, you could call that worse,” said Charlie Gischlar, State Highway Administration.

“Well, we really didn’t want to take any chances. We knew that there was going to be some ice, and icy conditions can be even more treacherous than the accumulation of snow,” said Adrienne Barnes, Baltimore City Department of Transportation.

So the problem will be that whatever melts down during the day will re-freeze overnight.

Road crews will continue to be out with the hope temperatures will remain above freezing long enough for Marylanders to brush off Mother Nature’s effects.

The State Highway Administration requests you call 511 to get reports of current road conditions.