Area road crews are plowing ahead in what’s proving to be a grueling season, though experts say their work has been underway for months.
Rodney Renwick, highway superintendent for the town of Unadilla, entered his 16th season in the elected position this year. He said that the department includes four employees and four 10-wheel plow trucks, four midsize trucks and a loader backhoe. The crew, he said, covers 116 lane miles in the town.
Renwick said he begins prepping for the coming season “almost as soon as winter is over.”
“Part of that is due to bidding and supplying the road grit for the next season,” he said. “We have to order it and haul it in. Ours comes from a local gravel bank, and we have to order salt in June for the following year.”
“Usually, before it even is the season to plow snow, you get all your equipment out and get it ready, make sure it’s all going to work,” said Bailey DeBetta, highway superintendent for the village of Afton. “Beginning of November, at the latest, we have our salters out and make sure the plows and salters are working, so if we need to get parts, we can.”
DeBetta, who has been in his appointed position for roughly four and a half years, said that he oversees two employees, with the three-person crew covering three routes.
“I have mine in the village and they each have their own and, once they complete their routes, they bring the trucks back, wash them, load them up with salt and we have to do the sidewalks at our buildings,” he said.
Daren Evans, highway superintendent for the town of Delhi and the village’s street supervisor, said that he, too, gets a head start.
“In the late fall and early spring is when we put bids out for our winter materials and, once bids are awarded, we do start to have material hauled in — salt, and the majority of it is a grit mixture that we use on the town roads.”
Evans, in his 12th year in the town position and fourth with the village, said he and employees cover “78 center lane miles of road” in the town and “eight miles of streets and sections of sidewalks and municipal parking lots and other things along those lines” in the village.
“For the town of Delhi, we work with a seven-man crew, not counting myself, and we do have one seasonal employee,” he said. “We have five large truck routes to cover all the lane miles and at least two small trucks for smaller sections. It’s a roughly four-hour route on the town roads for those five large trucks, depending on the conditions.”
Breakdowns are inevitable
Beyond materials, mechanical maintenance has to happen before snow falls.
“It’s tough, because we have to have wear parts on hand — plow blades, shoes, drive chains — and there’s general, normal maintenance and cleaning of them,” Renwick said. “You have to make sure you have enough in stock. It’s all being prepared, because we don’t have the option of not being prepared.
“We ship 90% (of mechanical repairs) to outside vendors, and we try to schedule that around plow season,” he continued. “In the fall, all our trucks go out to get serviced, and we make sure brakes and lights and everything is done. If there’s an emergency, we do tend to do that in-house.”
“We go through all the trucks before winter — make sure tires are good, service them, get everything ready to go,” DeBetta said. “Then we have equipment to go through — a backhoe that we use to load salt … We do all of our maintenance ourselves, unless it’s anything under warranty. It used to be that you could buy a truck and it would last 20 years. Nowadays, you have to keep your fleet a lot newer to be able to afford to maintain it, so our trucks we keep for about five years, that way it’s under warranty.
“But general maintenance, we do,” he continued. “Cutting edges on plows, we replace the beginning of the season, and we have a few in stock. Salter motors, salter chains — you always keep a couple in stock. We make sure we have at least one spare of everything because, obviously, in the middle of a snowstorm, if you need a chain and don’t have one, you’re screwed.”
Evans said that the town of Delhi has a staff mechanic, “working year-round on equipment,” timing repairs to be ahead of summer and winter needs.
Even with such careful preparations, Evans said, breakdowns are an inevitable and complicating factor.
“We can’t seem to get away from breakdowns and people don’t understand how they happen so much,” he said, “but there’s no real way for a vehicle to be built to do what they’re required to do to clear snow. We spec them out as well as we can, but it’s an almost unnatural thing for these vehicles to do. They get a big workout.”
Dealing with weather
The inherent unpredictability of weather is chief among the challenges of the job.
“One of the hardest things is the timing of storms,” Renwick said. “If we get a storm at 10 at night and it leaves by 4, you get up and the roads are bare and we’re heroes, but if it snows at 6:30 (a.m.) and you get up at 7 and the roads aren’t plowed it’s like, ‘Oh my god. What are they doing?’ It’s a lot of trying to look at the future and the forecast and make educated guesses on what to do. It’s very routine, however nothing is ever the same. No two snowstorms are the same, so you have to be flexible.
“Timing dictates everything,” he continued. There’s the ambient air temperature, the road surface temp — there’s a lot of science that we put into maintaining the roads. The effectiveness of salt is 25 degrees, then it significantly drops to 9, then it becomes inert. It’s not like they didn’t salt the road, it’s that it was 9 degrees and you’d need to put 500 pounds per lane mile to make it effective, which is cost prohibitive. My total snow and ice budget here is $80,000 per year. Probably, if you hire somebody to plow your driveway, it’s 50 bucks a time.”
“Usually, we keep a close eye on the weather,” DeBetta said. “Say a storm is moving in. We’ll keep an eye and figure out when we need to come in that will allow us to clear the road, but not be wasting material. We don’t want to come in in the middle of a blizzard and put a bunch of salt down then have to come back and redo it again.”
“The past couple years have not been bad, but this winter has thrown a test back at us,” Evans said. “Nobody was used to this. Though we haven’t gotten significant snowfalls, it’s been constant snowfall from December on, so it’s been very busy and we’ve certainly used a large amount of our winter materials.
“That not knowing when it’s going to snow is really probably the hardest part, especially in a year like this,” he continued. “I always have to be aware and it’s never, ever out of my mind. It’s always a possibility and this year has proven that, and that’s the frustrating part, because it obviously costs money. We could have a dusting to an inch or two feet of snow, and it costs the same amount to put the materials down and do the same amount of miles.”
Long, unpredictable hours
The unpredictability of weather equates to long, equally unpredictable hours.
“Our snow and ice policy says we plow from 4:30 a.m. to 8 p.m., and that’s seven days a week,” Renwick said. “Since I’ve been here, the longest I, personally, have went was 38 days straight. I’ve just come off one that was 24 days straight. Some of those days are no more than four hours, but, like, Tuesday, I left my house at 3 in the morning and did not get home until 8:30 at night.
“It doesn’t matter if we’re plowing four inches or a half-inch, it’s still the same process and the truck time, the fuel cost, the material cost — it’s all the same,” he continued. “Currently, we’re at 60 times this season (of going out). Last year was a total of 35, and we average 70 to 90. The budget totally reflects the amount of snow and the amount of times. Our fuel usage last year was minimal, and we burned through 1,500 gallons last month.”
“I think the thing people don’t understand is how long it takes the guys to do the routes,” DeBetta said. “Some of the roads take four hours to do. If we know we’re going to get a lot, we’ll work right through, obviously, to keep up with it, but it all depends on the storm, really. You could have 100 people, and every highway crew is always going to wish they had another person. People don’t realize we have budgets we have to work within. We can’t just work 24 hours a day – it’s salaries, fuel, everything.”
“All winter long, you’re on call, and you never know when you’ll get called in or what the weather’s going to do, he continued. “It’s that way all year round, but worse in the winter,. I don’t mind it, but a lot of people don’t like it. You get called in, and they have an hour to respond and be here within an hour. I’ll send guys out at 6 (p.m.) and they might not get done until 10, then I call them in again at 3 and they have no time to sleep or be with their families.”
Evans said he also dispatches crews “all the time.”
“People do expect more out of the road crews,” he said. “New York state DOT is out, and they have almost 24-hour shifts, where towns and villages and counties can’t do that, but, being that their roads are bare more often, there’s more demand for ours to be, too.”
“The winter maintenance policies for both the town and village explain roughly our hours of operation,” Evans continued. “There’s always unforeseen circumstances, if we get a blizzard, but it’s a guideline, more or less, of when we start, and wintertime hours are 4:30 (a.m.) for the village and 5 o’clock for the town.”
‘Rewarding to be there for people’
At the job’s core is a sense of civil service and commitment.
“It is rewarding, being able to help people,” DeBetta said. “You see people who can’t get up their road and you go through, then they can, and people are nice. It is rewarding to be there for people.”
“When we finally get the roads cleared, even if we come in every weekend to do it, the best part is when they’re all clear and safe for the public,” Evans said.
“It’s knowing that you are providing a service and getting people to their destination safely,” Renwick said. “The life of the superintendent and employees is one of the most underappreciated positions there is. Even if there is a chance of snow, we still have to be available. It is 100% a 24/7 job in the winter, and even in the summer, honestly, and the level of commitment to residents is 100%.”