Who else pushes snow?

[smifwal]

What ya got for equipment? Do you salt? Gas or electric spreader? Post some pics

[evan1968]

Me! Me!
Been pushing snow for 12 years for the same company.
I drive a plow truck for the largest snow removal company in the county. 26 commercial parking lots just on my route.
Equipment for our route:
2- F350 diesel w/Boss 9' V's and aux fuel tanks
2-Komatsu 270 with 12-15-20' pushers
1- Cat 950 with 22' pusher
1-Kubota Tool Cat with 6' v
1- Mack 12 wheel 16ton salt truck with liquid tanks
1- F550 V box salt truck

Call me crazy, but it's fun going out at 2am with snow falling at a inch per hour.
The company has 110 employees for snow events. Avg 15 tons of salt per run.
We push lots of snow!!

[smifwal]

Awesome. I have been pushing snow commercially for 5 years. I am a area manager with a local company. I will find out how many people we have as a whole but I have around 40 people under me. I have 5 trucks all 350's boss 9'2" 3 skids and a backhoe. All of the trucks have 3.5 yard spreaders. Have you ever heard of Smith metal works in Newark? I am looking at becoming a dealer for them for their spreaders. They have no one close to us. I have read good things.

[evan1968]

Yeah, lots of guys run the Smith spreaders and dump bodies. Newark is about a half hour from us. They are pretty common around here. A few of our 550's have the Smith spreaders. I'm not up on all the internals of the Smith's but I know our mechanics like them.
How many inches per year do you get? My route is along Lake Ontario so we can get some crazy lake effect snowfalls. We had 102" last season.
Our trigger is 3" with two of our large grocery stores having a zero tolerance. They don't care what's falling from the sky, they want wet pavement. Dedicated loaders for those properties. Cha-ching$$ !

I'm getting the itch to drop the blade.

[smifwal]

Sounds like i need to move my equipment up there. We have a had pretty shitty seasons the last couple of years. We got a whopping 4.5 in and the year before 5.9 I know don't laugh. My wife is from queens and my family had a home in Colorado so we laugh at the weather we get here and the drivers, holy shit you would think there is a foot of snow on the ground the way these clowns drive. There are times we go out to salt and I am like,are you kidding me we are going out for this? Last year we went on Christmas eve for wait for it FREEZING FOG. Yep that is a real thing. FOG comes in and hits the ground and bamo black ice. Hahahahaha but they pay good money and being a area manager I get to work all my equipment from start to finish. I am sure most of these guys wouldn't know what to do if we got a real snow. How long is your average plow event last? A few years ago we had one that we plowed for about 60 hours then went back out for 13 days salting the refreeze.

[evan1968]

People here drive in anything!

[evan1968]

Freezing fog? That's a new one. Break out the liquids for that.

My route takes about 7-8hrs with 3-5". After that it's clean ups for 4-5hs the next night.

Our March storm last season was 18" in 24hrs. I was in the truck for 49hrs. It just wouldn't stop. My aux tank on my truck fuels all the loaders on my route. Went through 400 gal that storm. We spent another 4 nights hauling snow out of the lots. All our trucks and heavy equipment have radios in them so we can all talk to each other. Guys we're getting a bit punchy at about hour 18 and on. We had some good winds with that storm that created some crazy drifting. Don't know how many times I had to put the plow in V and just kamikaze through 6' drifts.

Hope you had contracts and not per trips the last few years with very little snow.
Do any work for the nationals? We had 6 Rite-Aids a few years ago that we're through a national. What a pain.

The 2 zero tolerance lots we do take about 4-5ton each and I love it when we get a dusting or a inch. Call the 12wheel salter and I have to meet him at both properties. I watch him make laps and go to the next. Easy hour and get paid for a 4hr min.
We have our own salt bin at the shop so reloading is easy. The salt mine is about a hour away so every week or so we take a convoy of trucks and resupply.

[Tiger Mountain Tile Inc]

Freezing fog. Can confirm.

[evan1968]

This is a huge plaza . Our contract is for the lot in the background. Nice and wet. Low bidder does the lot in the foreground. Don't get out of the loader to move the carts, go around it! God this pisses me off! Besides, there was about 2" of hardpack on their side. Drop the pusher,bucket scrape time!

[mullet]

Looks like fun.

[Davy]

We have a different kind of snow that falls down here. It's the kind that melts the next day and simply runs down the street.

[evan1968]

Only ice you see is in your drinks Davy?

[Davy]

Actually, we usually get ice instead of snow. Or, sometimes both. Usually ice though. Of course it doesn't take much to screw up the roads. People here can't drive on dry pavement, throw a little ice in and watch out.

Not very often though, 2 or 3 times a season on average.

[cx]

Craig, I spent most of my first 20 years in Yankee Land (PA, NJ, CN, NY) and still the driving conditions in the winter were worse in the DFW area than anywhere else I've lived. I was there mostly from the early 70s through the mid 80s.

As Davy says, it didn't snow that often, but the ice storms were horrendous. Didn't matter what you were driving, you weren't getting out of your driveway on those days. Even if we'd had snow plows they'd be stuck, too.

When there were big budget talks under way for the new DFW airport (actually the City of DFW Airport) it was decided not to provide funding for serious snow removal equipment. Plan was simply to shut the place down when there was ice and to let the snow melt on its own. Don't know if that ever changed.

[evan1968]

Ice storms are a whole nother world. Not fun to drive in even if you dared.
Up here when they call for ice accumulation we go out and do a pre treat salting on the properties. Towns do the pre treat on the roads also. Then we liquid. The liquid is brine consisting of rock salt and magnesium chloride dissolved in water. It eats thru ice like nobody's business. It's rock salt on steroids.