Taking a ride with Rodney in the big white truck

It hasn’t been easy

So I started my voicemail to the town’s public works director on Sunday with, “Hey Rodney, I know you probably don’t really want to hear from me right now but it’s Mark Reaman from the newspaper and I think we need to chat…” Rodney called me back before 8 a.m. on Monday and said he’d be driving a truck that afternoon. I asked if I could tag along…

Since I stepped in a huge puddle of slush to get in the big white dump truck Monday afternoon, my feet were soaked. Sitting in the cab of the truck, I made a few circuits from Whiterock Avenue to the town snow storage lot by Rainbow Park. Each circle took 15 or 20 minutes and the truck swayed like a boat in a harbor as it traversed the mangled streets.
Whiterock and the streets coming off it were an absolute mess. Piles of slush were stacked five feet high from one end of the street to the other. About a dozen people were involved in the process of trying to clear the street. Lois and Nancy from the town finance department were in safety vests directing traffic away from the work.
“It hasn’t been easy and we got caught in the perfect storm,” Due explained. “I understand why people are mad and frustrated. I’ll need a chiropractor after this week. I got a ton of phone calls from people calling me names. A lot of things out of control stacked up and made it the perfect mess. We are all out here trying to make it better. We love this town.”
The work crews had started tearing up or “peeling” the snowpack on Whiterock before 8 o’clock in the morning. At that time of day, the pack was frozen solid and the town motor grader had to use claws to tear it up. The pack melted quickly when the temperatures later reached into the 40s. Then the claws weren’t needed. The resulting slush made it hard for cars to drive, and there were several reports of vehicles becoming stuck. The crews spent some of their time pulling people out of the sinkholes.
Rodney had worked all hours of the day and night for the last week. A line of dump trucks waited on Whiterock to be loaded with slush. A huge blower filled each truck, which then hauled the slush to one of three lots in town. Private contractors that were hired to help haul the snow took their loads to the town gravel pit. Town trucks went to the Rainbow Park lot or the smaller snow storage lot in the southwest side of town.
A plow was working on another street to try to clear off the top layer of slush to make it drivable.
“One reason the pack was thicker than normal this year was because we had a lot of storms come in between 3 and 6 in the morning,” Due explained. “We plow when the level reaches six inches but a lot of times, those storms came in and we couldn’t plow until later that night. So people would drive on the roads and the pack would get thicker.”
At about 2 o’clock Monday afternoon, 146 truckloads of slush had been hauled away from the street. More than 225 loads would be the final tally for the day.
As we sat waiting for a second fill, a resident came up to Due’s window: “Rodney dear, thanks for all the work. I know you are trying.”
“That feels good,” Due said to me. “We aren’t hearing it much. I get it. But we are out here working hard and we can’t really control the weather that made this a mess. So that really means something to me.”
I got out of the truck at Third and Whiterock and stepped in another puddle. Due went back to work until the bus route got cleared. He stayed in the truck until 7:30 p.m.