LYNN – A sloppy, slushy mess of freezing rain and snow coated the Greater Lynn area Tuesday, bringing both the morning and evening commutes to an icy halt.City Public Works Commissioner Jay Fink said crews hit the streets bright and early around 5 a.m., when the first flakes started to fly.”We jumped right into a salting operation out of concern for schools and slippery road conditions,” he said. “That lasted most of the day before the storm changed to rain.As the morning wore on, Fink said crews were able to tackle the roads as the snowflakes changed over to rain and began scraping roads to remove hunks of accumulated ice.”Parts of the city got about two to three inches of snow, which then turned to a slushy mess and caused roads to get a bit slick,” he said.Flooding concerns were also on Fink’s mind as temperatures climbed to near 40 degrees by nightfall.”The only thing to do in low-lying areas is to open the catch basins because the salt base on the ground is eating through the snow,” he said. “The problem with that is the potential of rain inundating the storm system, so we may get localized flooding as a result.”Lynn Police say only a few fender benders happened during the sloppy storm, along with numerous cars sliding on the slick roadways as the result of freezing rain. David Graves of National Grid said only one customer was without power in Lynn as a result of the storm, along with roughly 150 others throughout Massachusetts. In addition, Grave said a manhole fire was reported by the police at the corner of Buffum and Blake streets around 7:30 p.m., which was quickly extinguished.”There wasn’t an outage as a result, but we have a supervisor on hand to see what happened,” he said.The storm snarled other parts of the state as well and may have led to the traffic deaths of two Rhode Island men, when their car struck a tractor-trailer in Douglas.With a potential storm on tap for Friday bringing with it the possibility of up to six inches of snow, Fink said the department is simply going to “do the best it can do.””We lost a few transmissions on our equipment during this storm and the people working on it are starting to feel the fatigue of the season, so we’re hopeful to not get another major storm,” he said. “But if we do, we’ll deal with it.”