Yeah, of course.
When we start our live ahead,
all the trucks start pulling out, right?
So it's just bad luck.
But we're live here at the garage at
the head of the county public works.
I am here with Andy Kramer.
Good morning, Andy.
He is the road operations
manager here and he also started
very early at around 4:30.
Even for the pros, though,
you guys said it was a little
dicey when the snow was
kind of heavy this morning.
Yeah, it was around 5:30 that a big
band of snow came through and and we
do even have heated windshields, but.
Even that wasn't keeping up with
our wipers and stuff too. So yeah,
we were struggling there for a little bit.
Yeah. And So what happens when stuff
like that happens? Do you guys
pull off in the kind of clear off.
Exactly. Yeah, we have to pull off
and and just kind of slap those
wiper blades against the windows
and then go as far as we can.
Usually if we're as long as
we're moving, that helps a lot.
But when we have to come to a stop
light and stop or a stop sign and
that's when it builds up pretty quick
for sure. And the viewers are right
now taking a good look at a plow.
And is that salt in the back there?
Yes, there's salt in the back.
And also on the side,
you'll see those saddle tanks,
they're full of brine,
which is liquid salt.
And then we add a little
chemical called APEX,
which helps melt snow at a
lower temperature as well. So
walk me through the process of like,
what comes first? Is it the brining,
the salting, the blowing. So
in certain storms,
we will go out and pretreat,
but it really depends on the
moisture that's coming in,
how much moisture is. Coming in.
So sometimes we go and pretreat
the roads and this storm we didn't
just because of the snow levels,
we're going to be so high that we know
that that wasn't going to be the cure all.
So right now we we really focus
when it's still snowing on,
trying not to use too much material.
We we use our plows to scrape
it off and then going out on
our second round right now.
Now when we clear it off,
we'll start to put some more material down.
And help now
talk to us a little bit about your fleet.
How big is your fleet?
I know it looks like 0 right now,
but that's a good thing
because everyone's working
right. And this is only,
this is one of five shots that we have.
This is obviously our largest SO26
trucks come out of the shop alone.
We do have a total of 77 trucks right now.
There's 64 out and the other ones
will be going out during 2nd shift to
keep keep patrolling and then at 2:00
AM we'll do another full call out.
Which will be 64 at that time.
A little bit of a shout out to
all the drivers who came in super
early cause you said they were
taking a break and now everyone's
kind of gone after their break
right 100% love the people that work
here and they do a fantastic job.
So this will be, we'll have 312 hour
days in a row so they'll be looking
forward to the weekend and hopefully
they'll be able to get some more rest.
I was going to say that
is a lot to ask of a crew.
Yes it is,
it is and you know when you're sleep.
Schedule gets kind of messed up.
I know even myself last night,
I I didn't have to go out to plow today.
But you, you kind of sleep with one eye open.
You know what's coming.
You know we're getting ready.
So even that even if you go to bed
at 8:00 and you're here at two,
you still probably didn't
get that six hours of sleep.
You know,
also, cooperation from the
Community also is really important.
You said this morning lots of
folks actually stayed home,
and some of the roads that
you guys were working on,
it was just a lot easier
because it was empty.
It was it was really helpful.
Not to have to dodge, you know,
cars trying to pass us and things like that.
So I noticed it. I was at out at
5:30 till about 6:30 and it was.
It was much less today,
so I was very thankful for that.
We had no accidents today with our plows yet,
so that's a blessing, you know,
so it's been really good. Yeah,
I know our viewers are probably
really sick of hearing this,
but we have the safety procedures
making room for the plows.
Could you remind us again if you
if they run into folks outside,
right, right, absolutely.
So, you know, our biggest thing is we weigh
56,000 pounds roughly going out of here.
A normal car weighs £4000, so.
It's best just to say back from us because we
might not even know if you hit us literally.
So yeah, just staying away
from us and let us do our jobs.
One thing I want to remind people
is you'll see us going down a road.
We may, we may swerve a little bit to
catch a turn lane or something like that.
That doesn't mean we're turning we're,
we, we, we very likely will be
coming back into that through lane.
So that's why it's best just to
stay behind us and you know.
You'll know if we're actually
turning because we'll make the turn.
But, but if you see us swerving,
you know, just stay safely behind us.
Yeah.
Another interesting tidbit
that I wanted to get to.
We're gonna get to an impressive
salt pile that's out there.
Can you give us a rough estimate on
how much salt is sitting out there
right now or how much have you used?
There's 15,000 tons of salt.
That's our largest salt
shed and there is probably.
I would say 13,000 out
there roughly right now.
So when we do have these storms though
we we get it refilled obviously, you know,
but that definitely lasts us all winter.
Like we we don't go through that ********
even on a even on a busy winter like
it's bad. Well see that is an interesting
fact that we want to return to.
So stay with us. We'll have coverage
throughout the day here and we'll
bring you more updates from the
garage here in Hennepin County,
but for now we'll send it back to you.