By Lauren Wanko
Correspondent
While most of us were sleeping through the snowfall, public works crews throughout the state were up all night long clearing roadways.
We’re in one of the Belmar DPW snow plows. The crews have been out on the street since yesterday morning. They started salting the roads and they began plowing at around 7 p.m. They haven’t stopped since.
All Belmar DPW staffers are on-call today in staggered shifts.
“What we try to do in the snow plow is go in tandems, two trucks at the same time. One goes down the center, one goes off to the side so we try to clear the street, as you can see from curb to curb. This plow has an angle on it, what it allows it to do is cut from the center of the road to the curbline so it pushed all that snow to the curbline,” said Belmar DPW Assistant Superintendent John Maguire.
After the storm, crews will clear the snow-covered catch basins. Maguire says last night’s light snow — carried by high wind gusts — made the job a bit more challenging.
“What happens a lot of times is when you are plowing you get a lot of snow and ice up in the windshield,” Maguire said.
When asked how this compared to the previous storm, Maguire said, “This wasn’t a bad storm.”
On the plow ride, we found a few residents who agreed.
“We’re very lucky. Our kids live in Boston and they’re getting clobbered,” Belmar resident John Finnegan said.
“It’s kinda been overblown. I don’t think it’s as bad as everybody makes it out to be,” said Robert Wall.
Still residents had to shovel out of their driveways.
“Everyone’s saying that it blew away, we didn’t get that much, but I thought we got a lot, doing the shoveling,” said Greg Flanagan. When asked if it’s a good workout, he said, “It is a good workout. I don’t have to go to the gym!”
Frank Cinelli lives across the street from the beach.
“It’s paradise most of the time, but when you get a nor’easter or hurricanes then you have trouble,” said Cinelli.
We even spotted a runner along Ocean Avenue.
When asked why he was running in shorts on the beach, Larry Bergmayer said, “Well I have hat and gloves on. No one got frostbite on their knees.”
Ten-year-old Hannah Doherty says today’s snow isn’t the best for making a snowman.
“So we’ve just been doing a whole bunch of snowball fights,” she said.
We also nabbed a few tips on making the perfect snow angel.
“You fall backwards first. Then you gotta get into the snow so you’re not just on top, cause you got to make an imprint. Then after that you just gotta move around,” Hannah said.
Her dad, Mayor Matt Doherty’s pretty pleased with conditions today too.
“No major beach erosion, no major flooding. It looks like the least of what could have happen,” the mayor said. When asked if he is relieved, he said, “Absolutely relieved. It’s a good day for me because it means we’re gonna have less overtime. Our budgets for DPW moving snow, when you look at taxpayer dollars, smaller storms are much better than a big storm.”