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Friday, February 15, 2019

Snow Plowing Technique

This won’t apply to those of you that are fortunate enough to live in a snow free warm climate. Those that do, will see the humour – and the expense.

I Know How To Plow Snow

Let me just say in past years I have had experience: Plowing snow on airport runways and taxiways (aerodromes), residential streets, parking lots, fire lanes, you name it.

Equipment included huge hi-speed plows, blowers with engines the size of a locomotive, right down to front end loaders, street plows, graders and so on.

I needed to say that so I could verify my opinion on the following comments.

Easy Winter

So far this year we have had a pretty easy winter. Some snow, freezing rain & ice, but it usually melted in a couple days so that grass and pavement were showing all around.

Our storm a few days ago was the biggest so far.

Can Dump Truck Drivers Plow Snow?

Every storm I watch this type of plow go up the centre of the street, sometimes with the plow down, sometimes not, but the trips are made. I live on a corner, and watch time and time again as said plow plows snow into the intersection.

There is a technique for doing intersections, T-intersections as well as full cross intersections – where you plow snow out of the intersection, not into it. That’s not taught anymore, apparently.

Oh The Sidewalk

Yeah that’s plowed too where I live. Sometimes by a Bobcat type machine towing a salt spreader. Other times with a John Deere tractor, with a blade wider than the sidewalk, also towing a spreader.

Entertaining, Humourous & Expensive

This last storm was all of the above. The street plow slowly drives up and down the street multiple times carefully cleaning the street. Yes both the plow and wing were down. The bank along the side was about 3 ft. high. Intersection cleaned, sort of. Then it left.

All of this is happening at night, so all of a sudden I have to spring up to see what is all the clatter, does it really matter?

Well its the sidewalk machine bouncing along with its spreader clearing the sidewalk. Other than keeping everyone awake, it is doing a pretty good job – this time.

An hour later, more noise louder than before, different, like something happening out of the ordinary. And it was!

Here’s the dump truck plow coming down the street and a fairly high rate of speed, plow down, wing down.

The perfect speed

The snow was flying off the wing of the plow, going over the 3 ft. bank on the edge of the street already there, and perfectly filling the sidewalk to capacity with two feet of snow.

I won’t say much more, but the sidewalk plow didn’t clear the sidewalk as easily as before. It was a next morning production to say the least.

The Humour

The next day in the print media and the broadcast media it was mentioned. “Season only part way over. Its a very hard year on the ‘snow removal’ budget.”

I could have written an article too. It would have been called: “Make Work Project Successful!”