LEWISTON — Road crews Thursday concentrated on getting ready for a new storm due to hit central Maine on Friday morning.
Megan Bates, Lewiston’s deputy public works director, said the crews that were on duty Thursday were taking down some snow drifts that blocked traffic sight lines and widening lanes along already plowed roads.
Major snow removal efforts will wait until Monday, she said.
“If we are going to do major snow removal, we’d rather do it at night, but we are taking care of some problem areas now,” Bates said. “But this next storm is coming in at 11 p.m. tonight, so we don’t want to pull people in to do snow hauling when we’re going to need them for that storm.”
Forecasters say that storm could dump up to 10 inches of snow in the area. The National Weather Service has issued a Winter Storm Warning for the area from 11 p.m. Thursday until late Friday night and both Lewiston and Auburn have issued parking bans through Saturday morning.
“I don’t think we’ll even get an opportunity to unhook the plows,” she said. “It may start at 11 p.m., it may start at 10 p.m. or it may wait until noon. But sometime this late evening or early in the morning we are going to need them all on hand.”
It’s been a test for the Lewiston crews and a smaller plowing staff.
The city has enough staff to use 22 pieces of snow clearing equipment for the main “A Team” shift during the height of winter storms.
Those crews work 16-hour shifts, operating everything from sidewalk plows to sand- and salt-dumping trucks and articulated loaders equipped with nose plows.
Once that 16-hour shift is over, however, the city has only 10 employees to replace the A Team. That means 12 of the pieces of equipment must be parked — all four sidewalk plows, four of the big plows, two dump trucks and two road sanders.
Efforts to clear the snow off of sidewalks and cart away accumulations from the sides of city streets will wait until Monday, she said, after both storms have passed.
“If you went out early this morning, you could see residential streets were open, Route 202 was passable,” Bates said. “Crews have done an unbelievable job getting these areas opened up as quickly as they did, and this is dealing with 27 inches of snow.”
Auburn Public Services Director Denis D’Auteuil said major snow removal will likely wait until next week because of this weekend’s storm.
“As soon as we start to see the storm coming in, we will be deploying our equipment and handling the storm the best we can,” D’Auteuil said. “It’s a challenge, with all the snow that we got, storage capacity on the curbs and sidewalks is not there. We’ll do the best we can.”
Auburn has a fleet of 20 plow and sanding vehicles working three shifts during the height of storms.
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