Brick Township Public Works Director Glen Campbell got a baptism of sorts when he coordinated his first major snowstorm over the weekend.
Township streets were choked with nearly 2 feet of snow after the massive storm over the weekend. Brick officials said cars parked on the street hampered cleanup efforts. Campbell put in almost 24 hours between Saturday and Sunday.
“I started at 5 a.m. on Saturday and I got home at 3 a.m. on Sunday,” he said Monday. “I slept for four hours and was back all day Sunday. I’m kind of gassed.”
Campbell began gathering his supervisors and fleet crew on Friday to decide who would work what shifts and how to best clear Brick’s 1,762 roads of what he thought could be up to a foot of snow.
“We were operating under the assumption it was going to be a 12-inch storm and it ended up being double that,” Campbell said.
The snowstorm that slammed Brick with 2 feet of snow on Dec. 19 and Dec. 20 wasn’t the only thing that presented a challenge, he said.
Both Campbell and Mayor Stephen C. Acropolis said public works employees were hampered by the number of parked cars on streets.
COURTESY OF MAYOR STEPHEN C. ACROPOLIS Public works has six large tandem trucks, and 42 smaller dump trucks and mid-range trucks. The township also uses private contractors to complement the fleet, he said.
Employees began combating the snow on Saturday morning by first salting roads with a spray of liquid calcium with salt, which prevents snow from bonding to pavement, Campbell said.
They went out later in the day to begin actual plowing and ran into problems in some of the older 1930s “pocket neighborhoods” like Breton Woods and Sandy Point, which have narrow roads, he said.
“They were our biggest challenge,” Campbell said. “They all own three cars and have room to park one. It’s a huge problem. If you sent a small truck in there, it got stuck. It can’t push 22 inches of snow or even 10, and a big truck can’t get through it.”
Acropolis plans to ask the Township Council to consider regulations that would require cars be taken off the streets during snowstorms.
“It makes it very, very difficult,” the mayor said.
And it didn’t help that one of the township’s two salting trucks broke down shortly after it was filled.
“They are the core of our salting efforts,” Campbell said. “A belt broke within the first hour. Two gentlemen backed the truck into the salt dome and had to hand-shovel 15 tons of salt out before we could fix it. They got a gold star already.”
Sustained winds of 35 mph with gusts to 50 didn’t help either, Campbell said.
“It takes us 10 to 12 hours to do the entire town,” he said. “When we were done, it just blew the snow back in the street.”
“All Saturday night, during the teeth of the storm, we had blizzard-like conditions, with whiteouts on the roads,” Acropolis said. “Our plow drivers couldn’t see.”
But it the storm wasn’t all bad.
“People got out and helped their neighbors,” Acropolis said. “I saw that a lot. When it snows like this, it brings everybody out.”
Acropolis should know. He and Councilman Daniel Toth manned snowplow trucks during the storm, which approached near-blizzard conditions at times.
“I used to plow in my younger years,” Acropolis said. “My stepfather was in public works. One woman came out and said, ‘You’re the mayor, what are you doing plowing?’ ”
But the township may follow a different game plan next time a storm of this magnitude occurs, by actually plowing the streets later, he said.
“We should have waited,” Acropolis said. “Those streets that were plowed during the teeth of the storm — by 2 a.m. you couldn’t tell they had been plowed. In hindsight it would have been better to have everyone come in at 3 a.m. on Sunday morning, so we would have had a full contingent.”
The mayor put the cost of the storm at between $200,000 and $250,000.