A Snow Removal Story From Winter’s Past

Well, ’tis the season for snow removal and so far this year Mother Nature has brought contractors all over the country some much needed activity. The past few winters have been slower and not as profitable for most snow removal contractors, so I’m glad to see many regions of the U.S. are getting off to a great start.

Although I spend much of my time in Florida during the winter, I still get to hear about the cold temperatures and snowfall from my family and friends back home, which makes me reminisce about the good ol’ days when I was in a plow truck running routes.

We had a lot of fun the first few winters we offered snow removal services to our customers at GroundMasters. There were a lot of  long, hard nights and some interesting ones too. So, since I’m feeling nostalgic this week, I thought I would share one of my most memorable stories from winter’s past.

A Snowfighter Story From Winter’s Past

One night during the early 90’s I was working a lot doing my thing in my Ford Bronco. It was about 3 am or so. I was servicing a large multi-tenant office warehouse complex that took hours to service, but you knew that when you pulled in. I had it down pretty good; I just kept driving forward pushing snow away from the building, taking it to the outside curb. When I was getting close to the end I’d start tucking in the corners.

Well I had been there for hours cranking it out (cranking out my stereo as well) and as I was backing up I heard a loud noise behind me. It wasn’t too bad, but it was bad enough for me to pull forward and get out to take a look. I figured I hit some garbage cans or something like that…

Well what I hit was the newspaper man’s car, or rather he hit me. We were both in a groove. He was riding through chucking papers out of his window as fast as he could and I was pushing that snow, now doing some backing up since I was tucking corners.

So I got out and to my surprise there was a ford Escort station wagon with the left front corner of the car shoved up to the windshield and every color fluid leaking all over the parking lot. Steam was coming out from under the hood as well. This car wasn’t going anywhere soon.

Fortunately for me I had a Reese hitch on my truck with a 2” ball and receiver sticking out the back. This was where my truck made contact with the newspaper car. I didn’t have a scratch…but his car was wasted. Luckily we were both going slow enough that there wasn’t a big impact and we were both ok, but his car was finished.

We were both seemingly unhappy that the accident happened, and we didn’t agree on who’s fault it was. So we called the police. I told the newspaper man that I’d be right here working, finishing up the lot till the officer arrived. He did about 45 minutes later, and after a few questions he let us both go. We ran into each other in a private parking lot so we were each at fault for repairing our own vehicles. We were both to blame in other words.

That was definitely one of my stranger or memorable snow nights. What about you? What’s one of your most memorable snow stories? Share it with us in the comments section of this post.