RUMFORD – Officials speaking on behalf of town road crews in Rumford and Peru said Tuesday that conditions caused by the weekend’s blizzard were atrocious.

“It was like hell at night,” said Peru Road Commissioner David Gammon. “It was probably the most snow I’ve ever plowed in the 10 to 11 years I’ve been here.”

Gammon estimated that between 30 and 36 inches fell across Peru’s 31 miles of roads, creating a pile of work for Peru’s three-person road crew.

“Between 10 p.m. Saturday and Sunday morning, we just chugged along. We couldn’t go more than five miles an hour,” Gammon said.

Crewman John Moro agreed.

“It was bad,” he said. “For a big part of the time, you couldn’t see nothing, not the road, not the snowbanks, nothing. You couldn’t even tell where you were.”

Despite working in zero visibility trying to combat the storm, Gammon said his crew had “real good luck” and only one minor breakdown when a hydraulic hose broke.

Gammon’s crew began plowing Saturday at 3 p.m. and were still finishing up with snow removal Tuesday afternoon.

“The guys have done a super, super job,” he added.

Pam Duguay, a clerk at the Rumford town garage, also praised the work done by town crews.

“They’ve been busy, busy, busy,” Duguay said, noting that the 15-person crew and spares had worked from Saturday afternoon through Tuesday.

After clearing the roads, crews began the arduous task of snow removal, an effort that she expected to continue through Tuesday night.

Roads and sidewalks in downtown Rumford Tuesday showed a marked improvement over Monday’s high snowbanks of plowed snow that caused drivers to park in roadways. It almost seemed like a statement.

“Yesterday at 7 a.m., they started cleaning what they could, then last night they came in and cleaned. And tonight, they’re still going to be cleaning snow from the roads,” Duguay said Tuesday afternoon.

Aside from normal maintenance matters and one truck going off the road in the blizzard, “we were very fortunate. In town, you couldn’t even see anything in the blizzard,” Duguay added.

She said it was the biggest snowstorm in Rumford since either 1969 or 1970. Duguay pegged Rumford’s snowfall at 35 inches.

She also thanked residents for staying off the roads during the blizzard and for realizing that crews were doing everything within their power.

“People have been pretty cooperative. There hasn’t been a lot of phone calls because I believe people realize there’s no place to put all that snow,” she added.

But, Duguay wasn’t looking forward to the National Weather Service’s forecast of rain Wednesday night and Thursday, because none of the catch basins have been cleaned yet.

tkarkos@sunjournal.com

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