City of Duluth street maintenance gearing up for winter season
DULUTH, Minn.– Before you know it, the city of Duluth will be covered in a blanket of snow and ice.
But before this happens, street maintenance workers still have their work cut out for them.
“Right now, basically, we’ve wrapped up our construction season for the year. We’re still doing some spot repairs. We’re still doing some pothole patching. We’re getting some of those kinds of overhanging brush that may interfere with our plow trucks that tend to damage,” said Geoff Vukelich, Street Maintenance Operations Coordinator, City of Duluth.
And when both the streets and trucks are tuned up and fixed, it’s time for the operators to hit the streets for a test drive.
“We have a lot of new staff this year, so we got a lot of good training going on. And then overall, we try to make sure that the operators understand what routes they’re in, so they’re driving around with these fully dressed paw trucks. So, if people have seen them in seen them in their neighborhoods already, there’s not snow coming,” said Vukelich.
Throughout winter in Duluth, the team of 25 trucks will tackle 158 miles of priority roads as well as 532 center lines to plow.
“Each operator is responsible for almost 25 miles in and of itself. So, when we see those back-to-back, what we call stacked events, where we see a snowstorm on top of a snowstorm. You know, sometimes our operators are working 100 hours throughout a week,” explained Vukelich.
Another thing to consider with the snowplow season is keeping garbage cans and cars away from emergency routes.
But other than that, no matter what comes their way, they’re ready for anything.
“We’re not going to lie, the winter of ’22 and ’23 obviously, that set the record. We were very, very busy. So, the last couple years we’ve been able to kind of regroup, re-strategize with the climate, kind of changing around the Duluth area. We also have to change our operations and kind of be prepared for both those record setting winters,” said Vukelich.
