By Scott Taylor,Staff Writer

LEWISTON – Side streets were a snowy mess Friday morning, and city crews were still digging out in later in the day from a wet, heavy snowstorm that started Thursday morning.

Crews are expected to begin trucking snow to the city snow dump on River Road Saturday. It will take crews that long to get the streets clear, said Lewiston Public Works Director Paul Boudreau.

He expected to have streets cleared by tonight and sidewalks cleaned up in a couple of days.

“The volume of snow is what really did us in,” Boudreau said. “It was so heavy down at the bottom that it was really hard to move.”

At least half of the city’s 37 plow trucks got stranded at some point during the storm, Boudreau said. Most were pulled out by other city vehicles, but two were stuck overnight waiting for private tow trucks.

Joline Gagne watched two city trucks get stuck Friday morning on Parker Street.

“We live on a hill there, and I watched a snowplow back into a snow drift and just stop,” she said.

A sand truck came to tow out the plow, but that vehicle got stuck, too, Gagne said.

“It was real icy on the hill, so it just kept going when it turned the corner,” she said. “It slid right in next to the other truck and got stuck right there.”

So heavy’

City crews struggled to clear roads and sidewalks even when they stayed on the road, Boudreau said.

The heavy snow overwhelmed most of the smaller snowplows working to clear city sidewalks.

“There was so much snow, and it wound up piled in ridges right on most of the sidewalks,” Boudreau said.

Accidents also hindered road crews in Lewiston, according to the public works director. “There were a lot of tractor-trailers off the road around the area,” Boudreau said.

And Auburn’s plow crews had their share of problems, too. Several plow trucks got stuck overnight and had to be towed, said Traffic Supervisor Dick Keene.

He said that the wet, heavy drifts were more than a match for some trucks.

“It’s just so heavy, you have to put the plow down at an angle to push it,” Keene said. “Then it starts to push your plows sideways. It’s taken us at least two to three times longer to get done.”

He added that when plows are out all night, equipment fails. “We’ve had tire chains break, hoses break. It’s just one of those things.”