We have a lot of snow in Western NY. Here’s how we handle it.
Our property taxes pay for services: trucks, plows, loaders, salt, wages including employee overtime.
We get fantastic service. Depending upon the accumulation trucks go out at 3 or 4 AM. They are huge, 10 wheel plow trucks weighing 36,000 pounds loaded, with salters and side wings. The trucks travel at high speed (50 mph in a 30 mph zone) to shoot the snow long distances. The ground rumbles and our houses shake when they go by. They use the town right of way so anything on your front lawn is obliterated if it is in the ROW. Mail boxes, stone statues, small cars, garbage cans are gone from the street and end up in pieces on your front lawn.
The town replaces mailboxes and posts for free. Everything else in the ROW is your problem.
They do the main feeders first, then secondary streets. My road is a 1 mile dead end so they do us toward the end of the route – 6 AM. The plow takes up 80% of the road. If it is coming your way you have to hide in a driveway or ditch your car in a snow bank. Like a freight train, they cannot stop. If you are facing the plow, sometimes you can see the sparks from the hardened steel blade striking the ground like flint on steel. Awesome power.
Trucks have two operators – a driver and wingman who tries to save mailboxes.
After several heavy snowfalls, the snow can be piled up 5–6 feet so on a quiet day the crews come out with loaders and mover the piles onto your lawn or a nearby ditch. That leaves space for the next snowfall.
Even though they are not supposed to, the plows will help pull your car out of a ditch if they are going by. You accept that they are not responsible for damage and you hook the chain onto your car yourself. They pull you out. It takes only a few seconds.
Two years ago, a plow truck slid off the road and tilted about 30 degrees from the vertical, dumping salt. It took two tremendous wreckers to pull it out. In the summer, the town came, removed the poisoned soil and replanted with new grass seed.
We love our plow guys!