Well, it is winter (although at first the winter seemed more like fall would never end) so it seems like a good time to write about snow plowing. What you need in terms of a company to hire depends on your needs. You may just need someone to shovel or snow blow the walk in front of your house. If you have a driveway, especially a long one, you will need a company with snowblowers or plows. However, if you are a business with a parking lot, you need someone who has greater capacity and if you have a parking lot like you would for a mall or an office building or school or college, you are going to need a company with serious capabilities.
Advance Planning is Critical
One of the most key things is to have someone lined up in advance. As they say, you can fuggedaboutit if you try to call someone on the day of the storm. They are going to be taking care of their current customers, not new ones. How do we know this? We have two lots on opposite sides of town. Our guy finished the first one and the his truck broke down and couldn’t get the second one done. Numerous phone calls were made. Out of all those phone calls, they either laughed at us or we got answering machines because they were out plowing snow. Out of all the phone calls, we only got one call back and that was a week after the storm.
Plowing Plan
You also want to go over ahead of time where they are going to put the snow. Sometimes with a really deep storm, they run out of room for all the easy places. One time our guy pushed up a large pile of snow in front of a tenant’s overhead door because they had done it in the past when that door wasn’t being used. Now it was being used but they hadn’t been told. But the snow had frozen solid and they couldn’t easily move it with the plow. So we use pick axes and shovels to move the snow from in front of the door.
The Right Equipment
If you have a really deep snow, it can be difficult for a pickup truck with a snow plow. The big plows the city and state have aren’t bothered in the same way. So it can be good to have someone who also has a front end loader that can be used in combination with the plow on the pick up truck. However, you also need to know how to use the snow plow. With a recent 2.5 to 3 foot snow fall we had one truck who couldn’t push that much snow, he just started slipping as the amount of snow on the blade grew too big. Another plow came in that was approximately the same size and had no trouble at all. Part of it was that the driver drove like a wild man. But the major reason was that he had put a lot of weight in the bed of his pickup and the first guy had no extra weight at all. It apparently made all the difference in the world.
