Adrien LeBlanc likes it when it snows hard.
The 27-year old has been driving a snowplow for the Department of Transportation for six years.
"It's fun when you have snow to plow," he says peering through the windshield for a glimpse of the road. "I don't like chasing snowflakes, always wondering do I drop the plow or don't I. When it's like this, you just plow."
Tonight, Saturday, Feb. 11, the night of the big storm, he's got his wish. He's clearing four or five inches form the Ridge Road and it isn't showing any signs of letting up.
The snow is falling sideways. And worse it's blowing up from the blade and right across the road in front of him.
"Where's the centerline?" he asks with a big grin. "We'll see how close I am when we come back."
LeBlanc's regular run is the Ridge including North Range round to Barton, Doucetteville, South Range and Plympton-the back roads of Digby County. A normal trip takes him three hours. Except there's no such thing as a normal run.
Tonight for example he's missing his on-spots- chains he can normally drop with a flip of button to give him traction when he needs it. They need repairs so he'll have to make do.
It was warm all day Saturday and rainy before the temperature dropped and the snow came down. The roads are especially slick and the snow is wet and heavy. At every intersection he drives by first, backs up and goes ahead several times until he's cleared the intersection and then backs up a final time to turn right.
He starts tonight in Jordantown and his tires spin every time he starts ahead. Turning right uphill out of Beechwood Lane, he has to back up and shove at the snow.
Eventually he gets the intersection clear and the truck crawling up the hill. Coming down is quicker.
Soon he has the plow bouncing over the Ridge through a white out. He's trying to get the centerline clear and after six years he knows the road well enough to make a good guess.
He says it's trickier when they're trying to get the road opened a bit more and don't know where the ditch is.
"You get over a little far and you just drift in," he says with a shrug. "Everybody's been in the ditch and if you haven't, just wait. Soon as you make fun of someone else, you're going in too for sure."
If only his biggest worries were just the centerline and the ditch.
"We're supposed to clear the centerline and people come at us at 90 km/h," says LeBlanc. "It only takes a bit of slush to pull them over in front of us. Or they don't slow down when they pull over to the shoulder and the snow there grabs them and they yank the wheel back and we have no idea where they're going to end up."
LeBlanc also has a few more dials and switches and joysticks than your normal truck. It's a bit like a helicopter cockpit in there. There's an array for salt, for the plow for the wing. He watches a pulley on the tower for slack to make sure the plow is down just far enough, he watches the wing through an array of mirrors.
Sometimes when he can't see the centerline looking forward, he keeps the plow centred by glancing through the mirrors at the cleared road behind him, looking for the yellow line there.
Before he's gotten even half way through his run, the shift supervisor calls with a change of plan. There are usually six trucks running out of Digby: one does the Ridge, one does Weymouth, one does Bear River and Culloden, one does Digby Neck, one does the Islands and one takes care of the 101.
The wipers on the 101 truck are broken and can't be fixed. Without wipers in a storm like this, it's not allowed on the road, so LeBlanc has to take over the big highway.
The department has four main levels of service. The 100-series highways always come first and have to be cleared within eight hours of the end of a snowfall. The drivers can salt before, during and after a storm.
On secondary roads and local roads, like LeBlanc's normal run, they can't salt during the storm. The department tries for a 2.5 to 5-metre wide clear strip on secondary roads within 12 hours of snow stopping. Local roads should have a 1 metre to 2.5 metre bare strip within 24 hours.
[DOT's When will my road get plowed? provides more info on Levels of Service.]
Only dirt can be used on gravel roads and the level of service requires that the road be "snow packed" within 24 hours.
The highway is a lot smoother, no more banging and smashing though there is still a lot of bouncing. And still a lot of snow. In Gilbert's Cove with the wind off the water, the snow is piling up in drifts. The wind blows the snow from the plow up in a white out and LeBlanc can't see a thing.
He turns around at the St. Bernard exit and stops for a few minutes at the bottom of the onramp. He circles the truck, clearing the lights and mirrors of ice and snow. He has had the heat on full blast the whole trip trying to keep the windshield clear. He still has to clear ice from the sides of the window and clean the wipers.
On the way back up the 101 he hears one of his colleagues is in the ditch-the mechanic who came in to work on the truck with the broken wipers. The department's loader is headed down to pull him out-LeBlanc gets there first and clears away snow and salts the road and then parks his truck to warn traffic.
Fifteen minutes later he's on his way again, headed for the Bear River Bridge, what the plow drivers call the upper end of the 101. The controlled access is wider and takes two runs per side to clear it.
LeBlanc figures it will take the rest of his shift to make the two runs and clear the ramps.
Before he can finish his first run, the supervisor calls and tells him the lower end has drifted in bad: could he make one quick trip down there before his shift is over?
Luckily the department's grader is working on the ramps and with his wide blade is also helping to keep the upper end clear.
Through Gilbert's Cove it's like LeBlanc was never there. Drifts and whiteouts. He's late for the shift change but then everyone is.
"Just a normal night," he says.
He finishes up his paper work in a hurry. He can't wait to get home and try out the new plow he bought for his own truck.
jriley@digbycourier.ca
