Goodbye Storm of 2010!

By Pat Biancaniello

Have we seen the end of the Storm of December 2010?  Smithtown Highway Superintendent Glenn Jorgensen certainly hopes so.  Mr. Jorgensen, sounding very tired at noon on Monday, December 27th. was quite pleased with the way the Smithtown Highway Department handled the snowstorm. 

 The Smithtown Highway Department had roughly 100 of its vehicles and 40 private vehicles on the road from 10 a.m. Sunday, December 26th through 11p.m. in the evening.  The workers were then given a rest only to resume the work of clearing the snow from the streets at 3 a.m. on December 27th.  “The crews will remain on the roads until the job is completed”  Jorgensen said.   As of noon on the 27th all the main roads were clear and the workers were pretty much finished with courts, and dead end streets which are always the last to be completed.

All things considered, high winds, lightning, heavy snowfall (around 13 inches in some parts of Smithtown)  things went as planned.  The crews were successful in clearing streets reasonably well, but were back on some streets three hours later because of the high winds which blew the snow back on the roads and in some cases created high drifts. 

 Jorgenson said that schools being closed was a blessing and that there were not too many parked cars on the roads that needed to be plowed around.  Some breakdown’s in equipment, while annoying, were handled by crews working together to cover areas that were originally assigned to different crews. 

 Falling trees created some problems. A tree on Rte. 25 by Old Willets Path took down a pole and caused Rte. 25  to be closed from Old Willets Path to Meadow Rd.  near the bull.  

All in all, said Glenn Jorgenson, “The highway workers did everything they could to clear the roads of snow as quickly and as well as they could.”