Town staff outline street sweeping route

EAGLE STAFF

Councillors saw the route that town staff follow when they sweep streets.

A resident had suggested that the town put out signs before sweeping starts so people wouldn’t park on downtown streets, Mayor Trevor Hay said during the Dec. 2 council meeting.

One past winter, the Public Works Department encouraged people to park elsewhere before they begin to clear snow off streets and “it did not make people stop from parking on the street,” superintendent Bob Bors said.

In the cities, “They have no problem towing your vehicle,” Bors said, indicating it once happened to his.

“If you’re in those zones, they tow your vehicle,” he said. “We don’t tow vehicles, so we have no recourse if you don’t move your vehicle. We’d go around the same car that we would have whether the sign was up or not.”

Plowing around vehicles owned by people who live nearby “is just part of the job for us,” he said.

Also, street sweeping likely couldn’t follow a precise schedule because the town doesn’t clean streets when it’s raining and workers can get pulled away to other tasks if they’re needed, he said.

Meanwhile, “We have glitches,” Bors told Hay, who asked how the sweeper was working. “Once you figure out its quirks, you can make it work,” he explained. “It’s when you put someone different into it” that they have trouble.

The manufacturer converted “little delivery trucks” into street sweepers and went out of business in about eight years, he said.

If the driver gives it “some throttle instead of just creeping” onto a highway, “it goes into a limp mode and shuts off half the injectors,” Bors said.

Staff at four different repair shops haven’t found what causes the problem “and it doesn’t do that every time,” he said. It has a European diesel engine “that nobody has a licence to work on,” he added.

“The problem with sweepers is that they are very expensive and the town, years ago, went with the cheapest option, which was a no-name brand which is no longer in business,” he said. Sweeprite can supply some parts that will work on it, he said.

The map, which he agreed could go on the town website nearer to spring, follows much the same order as for plowing snow and sanding, Bors said.