While we were out making visits a couple of Sundays ago, we saw this big snow blower cleaning up the snow. A couple of large graders had plowed the snow into the center of the street. (The street is Cherry and runs in front of Muldoon Elementary School.) The collector/blower is attached to the front of a very big front end loader. It gobbles up the snow and blows it into the back of dump trucks with beds that have been enlarged by building up the sides. We watched the blower fill up three or four truck while in the parking lot of Muldoon School. It took the machine less than 30 seconds to fill up the bed of the waiting dump trucks. Fascinating process.
"What happens to the snow in the dump truck?", you ask. It is hauled to one of the many large open areas around Anchorage where it is dumped and then caterpillars push the snow into snow hills that soon become very large and very high. One of our ward neighbors said with the large snowfall this year, some of those piles will probably not completely melt before the first snowfall this coming winter.
"What happens to the snow in the dump truck?", you ask. It is hauled to one of the many large open areas around Anchorage where it is dumped and then caterpillars push the snow into snow hills that soon become very large and very high. One of our ward neighbors said with the large snowfall this year, some of those piles will probably not completely melt before the first snowfall this coming winter.
Waiting for a dump truck...
waiting...
truck is arriving...
the process begins.
Notice how high the truck bed is.
Gobble and blow!
Gobble and blow!
The blower is moving at a fairly quick pace.
The truck is nearly full.
A moment's wait for another truck...
another truck moves in and the process starts again.
Snow removal in Anchorage, and elsewhere, is a major wintertime occupation in Alaska. The cities and the State have considerable money invested in graders, plow trucks, dump trucks, etc. What is also interesting is that many of the landscapers have trucks which have snow blades that can be attached to their trucks when the snow flies. Instead of sitting on their duffs all winter, they attach their snowplow blades to the front of their trucks and clear parking lots for apartment homes, businesses, and churches. We wondered why the parking lots at all the LDS chapels were so large when we first got here last year. Now we know that they are large to accommodate all the snow that is pushed to the back of the lots after the snow storms. They also come in afterward and use another attachment on the back of the truck which throws gravel all over the place to try to mitigate the slick snow after they have finished plowing.
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