When it comes to government employees, they’re often overlooked, unfavorably compared (especially at budget time) to police or firefighters or even completely ignored.
We’re talking about local public utility workers and Virginia Department of Transportation employees whose jobs are essential any time of the year and nigh indispensable when winter weather hits.
The winter of 2009/2010 is shaping up as one of the worst this decade. A record snowfall hit Central Virginia just a week before Christmas. Just last weekend, another storm dumped almost a foot of snow on the region and the commonwealth. Three days later, a clipper system rushed through, bringing a dangerous wintry mix in its wake. And to add insult to injury, the possibility of another major snow-producing system looms in the forecast for this weekend.
Throughout it all, the men and women of Lynchburg’s public works department and, in the counties, of VDOT have been busy keeping the streets and highways safe for us to travel on.
When a big one hits, these men and women put in 12-hour shifts behind the wheel of a snowplow, pushing snow and spreading chemicals and abrasives. Often, they’re sitting in their trucks along major highways, in the frigid cold, waiting for the weather to strike to begin making the roads safe.
Their work begins when everyone else is home, safely off the highways.
There are few things scarier than driving a plow in a blinding snowstorm in the middle of the night, trying to keep major highways drivable, and you can’t even see where the highway is.
Throw into the mix drivers who think their four-wheel drive SUVs or heavy-duty pickups give them license to try to pass a slow-moving plow, and you’ve got a long night ahead of you.
And it doesn’t stop there. There are always the folks who believe their particular side street should be plowed before anyone else’s or who can’t understand the shovel-to-the-right concept to keep their drives from being reburied by the plow and take it out on the driver.
Quite often, after their 12-hour shifts have ended, these folks themselves go home to streets or country roads that are at the bottom of the plowing priority list.
So, the next time winter slams another storm in our direction and you’re sitting at home by your fireplace, remember who’s out there in the cold, pushing the snow and salting the roads so you can get to the store the next morning.
And thank them.
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