Road Crews Tackle Epic Storm Cleanup

Highway Departments in All Six Towns Labor Tirelessly Around the Clock to Remove Mountains of Snow

By JAMES KINSELLA

Vineyard road crews worked through the teeth of last weekend's storm, battling white-out conditions and drifting snow to keep the public ways clear.

When the snow slowed, workers in down-Island towns began hauling away tons of the white stuff, building small mountains in designated dumping areas.

"It was not the biggest but I'd say it was probably the most powerful storm we've seen here in a long time - the wind, the cold, the blowing snow, near-zero visibility," said Stuart Fuller, Edgartown highway superintendent.

"You couldn't see the road, you couldn't see the trees on the side of the road, you couldn't see the fences at Katama - you were just guessing," he continued. "Out on Atlantic Drive, my heaviest dump trucks couldn't keep up with the drifting. The drifts are conservatively eight feet tall."

"The storm was pretty hectic," West Tisbury highway superintendent Richie Olsen said. "It was blinding snow. The guys really had a hard time."

Over in Oak Bluffs, highway superintendent Richard Combra Jr. said, "This storm was like no other. My guys had to take things to a different level, shoveling out driveways and walkways of elderly residents. Town roads, private roads, they were all the same. We had to try to get everybody out. We just did what we could."

The storm shredded or overwhelmed overtime accounts set up by the towns to cover emergency snow plowing. Tisbury without a doubt doubled or tripled its overtime budget of $15,000, public works director Fred LaPiana said.

While Oak Bluffs had set aside $15,000 to cover potential overtime, Mr. Combra said the town expended $40,000 on this storm alone. In Chilmark, highway superintendent Keith Emin said the town blew past its overtime budget of $7,000. Chilmark crews worked 27 hours in a two-day period at the height of the storm.

Towns threw every bit of equipment they could at the storm, whether their own or that of private contractors. Oak Bluffs deployed 11 pieces of equipment, including a front-end loader, and hired private contractors to bring in six trucks with plows, four front-end loaders and four Bobcat plows.

Edgartown used two full-sized dump trucks, two small one-and-a-half ton dump trucks, four pickup trucks, one large front-end loader, two backhoes, a Bobcat with a snow blower for the bike path and two walk-behind snow blowers for the sidewalks.

At any given moment, Tisbury had five to six plows, two sanders, a Bobcat and a backhoe with a front-end loader on its roads. The town also contracted for two more front-end loaders and two large dump trucks to help load and carry snow out of town. Tisbury was bringing snow from downtown to the park-and-ride lot off State Road.

Oak Bluffs was moving snow to the Steamship Authority terminal on Sea View avenue, to the North Bluff parking lot near the Island Queen dock and to town parks. Edgartown was dumping snow in the parking lot at Lower Main street and in the trolley parking lot on Upper Main street.

The towns weren't the only government entities pushing snow out of the way. The Martha's Vineyard Airport used 12 employees and seven pieces of equipment: two trucks, two smaller trucks, two front-end loaders and a large snow blower to battle the wintry onslaught.

Assistant airport manager Sean Flynn said airport crews first had to plow snow off the airport runways, then use the snow blower to spread the snow out into the surrounding airport infield. Because of the potential hazard to aircraft, the airport cannot allow snow to pile in high banks along the runways, but rather must keep the snow immediately to the sides of the runways below the two-foot safety lights that line them.

Mr. Flynn said crews faced a problem before they could even get out to the runways. Winds from the north blew the snow into drifts up to nine feet tall against the doors of the truck facility south of the strips. Wind and the snow ended up closing the airport for about two-and-a-half days: from 10 p.m. Saturday through 10:30 a.m. Tuesday.

Mr. Flynn said the airport overtime budget of $35,000 will not last until the end of the fiscal year in June.

"The guys put in a lot of time and effort," he said. "They did a fabulous job. The hours were well worth it."

Meanwhile, the Massachusetts highway department contracted with private companies to operate 13 pieces of equipment - nine plows, three sanders and a front-end loader - to push snow off the 35 miles of state highway on the Vineyard.

"It was challenging," MassHighway spokesman Jon Carlisle said. "The winds tend to be high out there. There's the storm above, then there's the storm from the sides. It needed to be an ongoing effort. The plows repeatedly hit the same stretches of road."