It’s been almost a week since the snow started falling in the Blizzard of 2011 and crews in Barrington are still working hard to clean up the mess. The Barrington Village has hired drivers and rented a fleet of 5-Axle dump trucks to remove the remaining heaps of snow from Barrington street corners and parking lots. I snapped a few photos this morning at one of their snow dumping grounds.
Barrington Village officials will be meeting this week to review their start-to-finish blizzard cleanup efforts…
The Village alone has 55 miles of streets and, with both sides needing to be plowed, that’s 110 miles of cleanup work. They also had to hire contractual companies to offload snow from commuter and business parking lots, the central business district and from street corners where snow is piled high, obstructing visibility for drivers. Village Manager, Jeff Lawler says, during the height of last week’s storm, they had 25 full-time public works employees plus part timers working overtime to clear streets as quickly as possible.
“It was very challenging with the rate of snowfall. It was several inches per hour and then you had blowing snow and windshield icing on top of that….The drivers couldn’t see the roads and had very difficult conditions to drive in and fight the storm so I’m proud of their efforts and also very happy that the residents and businesses were understanding that we were operating in very difficult and unusual circumstances.”
Right now crews are loading dump trucks with remaining heaps of snow and moving those loads to two Barrington locations. One is at Ron Beese Park and the other is in a lot behind the Barn of Barrington on Route 59. And they’re also still busy locating and digging out buried fire hydrants. But, all in all, Village Manager Lawler says they’ve received mostly positive feedback from the community and they’re pleased that everyone stayed safe during one of the worst snow storms we’ve seen in Barrington since 1999.
