Paul Bass Photo
Riding four feet above Elm Street in his Volvo payloader, Donnie Rogers made snowbanks disappear from a turning lane and kept intersections clear, with help from a new $45,000 piece of machinery.
He’d been waiting for a chance to try out that machinery, a six-winged articulated plow blade attached to the front of the payloader.
The blade is one of 11 pieces of machinery the city bought in advance of this year’s snowstorms as part of an effort to modernize the fleet and clear streets more efficiently.
That was happening Monday afternoon as snow began falling again in the home stretch of the second major storm in a week.
Rogers, a 50-year-old Lee High School graduate who grew up around Dwight Street, is in his 29th year with the city’s public works department. Fourteen hours into a 16-hour shift, much of it spent loading vehicles with salt and sand, he got a turn piloting the blade along major arteries. Plow trucks had made the routes passable. Rogers’s job was to widen the path, to open up turn lanes and parking lanes, and to get the snow closer to the curbs.
At eight feet across, the new blade is two feet wider than the old blades. So it has more reach.
More important, in Rogers’s telling, are the six wings. From inside the payloader he can move each of the blade’s wings in different directions. He said that lets him plow a different way in some cases, and to improve on old techniques.
As he cleared the turn lane on Elm leading up to State Street, he shifted among six formations. (Click on the video to watch.) That enabled him, for instance, to clear snow to the right with half the blade while preventing much of it from drifting back into traffic to the left. It enabled him to claw the snow away from driveways. It enabled him more deftly to back up, blade raised, at the juncture of Elm and State to keep the intersection clear.
“I’m going to take the pressure off of the mound and I’m going to pull in. Then the mound is not so much,” Rogers narrated. “With a straight blade, I wouldn’t be able to come off it. It’s just too much. I take the pressure off of it. If I plow straight I’m going to plow everything into the street.”
He turned left onto State Street, then left onto Humphrey. For the most part drivers have been obeying the odd-side neighborhood parking ban, he observed — much more so than in past years. “They’ve been really listening,” Rogers said of New Haven car owners. “It makes our job easier.” Still, there were outliers. Rogers had to maneuver around them.
“This is where you wake up,” he remarked as he calmly darted around three illegally parked cars. “You don’t want to slide. It’s called ‘in and out.’” The payloader bent in the middle to get closer to the parked car. Like a customer at a barber shop, Humphrey Street emerged with a close shave and no nicks.
After close to three decades on the job, Rogers is used to the tight spots. He’s used to the long shifts during storms. He knows how much to fill his lunch bag to last 16 hours. At 2 p.m. the rations in the bag by his feet were holding out. He’d worked through “my Sugar Smacks” and some of the cake he’d baked. He had pretzel crisps left on hand along with water, raisins, sunflower seeds, and bags of chamomile tea to brew during stops at the public works central office on Middletown Avenue.
At Whitney and Temple he spotted a Yale Bobcat across the intersection. He paused, expecting the worst.
Often, he said, private Bobcat operators “throw [the snow] in the street. We clean up the street; they throw it out there. It makes our job harder. But it’s part of the job.”
In this case, the Bobcat operator kept the snow off the street. Rogers proceeded south, then turned onto Wall Street …
… where he encountered a U.S. postal delivery truck in the middle of the lane. Another one of those moments that “keep you awake.”
“This,” Rogers said, “is where you learn your skills of going down tight streets.” Through the windshield it was hard for the untrained eye to see where Rogers’s blade and truck would fit. He slowed down, but didn’t stop, as he maneuvered with ease. “The rule of thumb,” he said, “is if you can get an inch on both sides, you can make it through.”
In addition to improving clearance of wider main roads, the new equipment has freed up smaller equipment to focus earlier on narrower side streets. (Read about that here.)
Originally the public works department had planned to keep blades lifted for part of Monday, laying down salt and sand instead. That’s because after Sunday night’s snowfall, the forecast called for freezing rain in the morning. Officials worried that clearing all the snow would leave behind a layer of ice that would become harder to dislodge when it resumed snowing mid-Monday. They worried about ice and snow remaining in place as temperatures dropped well below freezing during the week, and in subsequent snowstorms.
Instead of freezing rain, New Haven received sleet, then light snow, which didn’t pose the same problem as “wet freezing rain,” said Jeffrey Pescosolido, New Haven’s public works chief. So his crews were able to plow right ahead throughout the day.
Life may crawl back to normal Tuesday morning, but the plow crews’ work will continue. Lots more clearing and widening lay ahead. Rogers said he begins a 12-hour shift at 5 a.m. Tuesday. As he finished his Monday shift at 4 p.m., he said he planned to “head home, relax, talk to my wife, see what needs to be done. Then I’m going to lay down, get back up, and fight this fight tomorrow.”
Awesome video.