Snow removal crews get chance to warm up before winter

Snow removal in Waynesboro will be no problem if the city’s Public Works Department applies the lessons learned from its training Friday.

Street Supervisor Pete Fitzgerald oversaw the training exercise in the parking lot on the corner of Arch Avenue and Main Street.

“It’s a refresher course for the experienced drivers and it’s a training course for the non-experienced drivers,” Fitzgerald said.

He helped to create a course of 102 obstacles designed to simulate situations snow plow drivers are likely to encounter on city streets.

“Basically, we tried to set up similar to what the streets of Waynesboro [are],” Fitzgerald said.

There are four routes during the day and another four at night to cover the city streets, Fitzgerald said, each with a route manager assigned four trucks and one piece of equipment. When the snow comes, there are about 70 people split up evenly on two, 12-hour shifts.

“It actually works great,” Fitzgerald said. “The whole city gets service all at the same time.”

As part of its snow removal equipment, the city has 16 dump trucks, eight crew trucks with plows, five backhoes, three loaders and a motor grader.

City Manager Mike Hamp came out during the morning training and drove the course in one of the dump trucks, knocking over seven cones. He said he got a different perspective on drivers’ job.

“It is a challenge,” Hamp said. “You don’t think about the limited views and the different perspectives on the road and trying to understand how to navigate a larger piece of equipment like that. It’s a lot different from driving a car or even a pickup truck.”

Fitzgerald himself gave a demonstration to employees gathered, knocking over a couple of cones. He said he had completed the course three other times – twice Thursday and once Friday – without an error.

Once everyone completed the run-through, they went to separate meetings to review their wards and the plan for where they will push snow – looking at main thoroughfares, secondary roads, problem areas, bridges and sidewalks.

Each crew also did a drive-through of their wards to refresh memories and look for changes that could affect snow removal.

Reviewing the early performances, Fitzgerald said he was pleased.

“They’re doing great, they’re doing good,” Fitzgerald said. “We changed the course this year from last year because they got used to it, so we switched it up on them, but they’re still doing pretty good.”

Andrew Ulrich, a meteorologist with Accuweather.com, says the Augusta County region could see more snow than last year, when it saw about 12.5 inches.

He expects harsher conditions to kick off this winter, but sees a January thaw before snow returns.

“It looks like it’s going to be slightly cooler than average, and slightly snowier than average,” Ulrich said. “We’re looking at a bookend winter.”