Make Way For Donnie Rogers’ 6‑Winged Plow

After 28 years plowing New Haven’s streets, Donnie Rogers has a new trick ready for this season’s snowstorms. Six new tricks.

The next time a serious snowfall hits the city, Rogers (pictured) will have a $45,000 ​“articulated” plow blade attached to the front of his city Volvo payloader, used to tackle massive amounts of snow on major thoroughfares. Until now he had only a single-piece blade to push all the snow in one direction in a single mass.

His new blade (pictured) has six wings on the bottom to adjust the position. He’ll be able to reconfigure the wings as he drives to handle accumulating mounds of snow more efficiently as he works thoroughfares like Whalley Avenue.

“It goes straight. It goes back. I can take one wing and put it out while the other one is back. Then it goes like this, like a scooper. We’ll be able to move the snow, put it to the side of the street, and scoop it if I need to get it out of the way,” then load it into a dump truck, Rogers said.

The adjustable blade was one of 11 new pieces of equipment the Harp administration unveiled against a background of falling flurries outside City Hall Tuesday. The equipment is expected to clear streets better, and do the job more efficiently.

In addition to the plow blade on Rogers’ truck, the city purchased a $90,000 ten-foot-wide ​“Snogo” blower (pictured below Rogers’ photo at the top of the story) that will get at hard-to-dislodge piles of snow that accumulate around, say, parking meters during heavy snowfalls or repeated storms. The city has purchased nine plow trucks (pictured above) for $180,000 apiece (payable over five years, from the capital budget). Five of the trucks have arrived; the other four are on the way. (The city has 40 trucks in the fleet.)

Mayor Toni Harp said her administration decided to modernize its equipment after learning in last year’s back-to-back storms that the city’s aging fleet couldn’t keep up with the job. Hence the new purchases. (Click here for a story about a dry run the city conducted to prepare for this year’s snows.)

“The old trucks were like having an 8‑track,” city Chief Administrative Officer Michael Carter (pictured with public space inspector Honda Smith) said Tuesday. ​“The new trucks are like having an iPod.”

Thanks in part to the computers inside the cabs.

Jeff Mustakos (pictured above), a public-workers driver with 11 years on the job, showed off the SpreadSmart Rx Cirus control panel (at right) inside the International cab he’ll be driving, one of the nine new trucks equipped with Henderson plows.

“This tells you the road temperature,” he said. ​“This tells you how much you’re putting down. You can set it to 500 pounds of salt per lane mile; we used to put down much more.”

The fleet’s trucks in the past carried salt. Or they carried dirt.

Now they carry both, as well as anti-icing liquid. The driver can switch among the options during a route.

The old trucks dropped a set amount of the salt or dirt, continuously, as drivers navigated the streets. The new computerized trucks stop depositing the salt or dirt when the truck idles at a light or a stop sign. As the driver proceeds, the computer adjusts how much to dump based on the travel speed.

“I can’t wait for it to snow,” Mustakos declared. ​“Let it snow!”