OPERATIONS
W
IT TAKES A VILLAGE
hat do you do when Mother Nature doesn’t cooperate with your plans? If you’re employees of the City of Minot Street or Sanitation Departments, you adapt. You go to Plan B. Or Plan C. Or whatever it takes.
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Snow events are extremely busy times for employees in Public Works. In 2019, we found out what happens when there’s a snow event during the City’s annual fall cleanup week. And what we learned is that various departments will band together, as expected, to do whatever needs to be done.
First, let’s go back in time a bit
T
he week of Oct. 7-11, 2019, was scheduled to be the City’s fall cleanup week, where residents can place unwanted items on the curb and crews from the Street Department, with some assistance from other departments, will remove the items. Tires, trees, old appliances, old furniture…you name it, they’ll pick it up. “We drop everything to help,” said Street Superintendent Kevin Braaten. “Generally we’re manning the rear-loading trucks, we have three or four pickups with two-man crews picking up appliances, and we have a crew that runs a front-end
RACING MOTHER NATURE: Sanitation crews pulled longer days and worked ahead of schedule during the Fall Cleanup week, collecting any items they saw on the boulevards. It was a break from the usual system, but this wasn’t your usual Cleanup Week.
