The Sandmen Come––

Cleaning Up Along The Roadways

By Dottie Evans

Fred Hurley, director of Public Works, would probably rather not have made the mess in the first place, but a very hard winter and a succession of snowstorms and icy roads required it.

And now it is up to the highway department to pick up what it laid down.

“We are talking about sand here and lots of it. Somewhere between 14,000 and 15,000 yards of sand and it’s pretty heavy stuff,” Mr Hurley said Monday.

Looking at the pickup schedule, he predicted that the Public Works Department crew would be out on the town roads with sweepers, backhoes, dump trucks, and brooms, and the week of April 14 would be spent on the school parking lots because Newtown schoolchildren and teachers were going to be away that week for vacation.

Overall, Mr Hurley could not predict where the crew would be going next but he did know for sure that the job was going to take about three months to finish.

“We won’t be done until July 4, is my guess.”

The sand pickup schedule is not being published yet, he said, because they “rotate every year so the same street isn’t always getting done first.”

“We already did sweep some roads before the last snowstorm,” he said with a sigh.

Asked whether the department could reuse the sand next year, Mr Hurley replied that it would be recycled in a way, but only as fill.

“We take it and mix it up as fill material. First, we have to screen it and get all impurities out.”

And why should it take so long to finish the job?

“Because we’ve got 260 miles of town road to cover and we have to go back at least twice, because there is curbing on both sides. That’s more than 500 miles of road,” Mr Hurley said.

As far as residents sweeping the last six feet or so of sand off their lawns abutting the roadway that the snowplows sprayed out in passing, Mr Hurley said he had no objection.

“If they want to put it out there, we’ll to sweep it up. But we don’t want piles of debris.”

In other words, sand is fine but forget the sticks and stones and unraked leaves. They would simply clog up the machines and create more volume than could be handled.

One way to know just how much sand was used during the winter of 2002–2003 is to look at the current town budget in which a total of $90,000 was set aside for sand alone. But that was before the actual hard winter occurred, burying those road sand estimates in snow and ice.

As a result, the Board of Finance voted two weeks ago to add $15,000 more from contingency into this year’s sand account.