Jacob Buttrey’s phone rang around 8 p.m. on Monday night. He’d just put his kids to bed, and he was getting ready to go sleep too. Outside, the temperatures kept dropping
“I got the call, and they said, ‘We have roads freezing up – let’s go,” Buttrey said.
Sleep would have to wait. Buttrey, a field supervisor for Brentwood’s Public Works Department, dressed quickly, grabbed a jacket, and then headed out into cold. An hour later, he was in a snowplow, spreading salt across city streets.
“We were out there until midnight, about four and half hours,” he said. “It was good practice for what’s coming.”
Earlier in the week, the National Weather Service issued a Winter Storm Watch for today, Jan. 10. If that storm drops the 3-7 inches of snow meteorologist are predicting, Buttrey and the rest of the Public Works Department will be ready.
The City of Brentwood owns 11 trucks that can be converted into snowplows. On Tuesday afternoon, they were parked under a shed behind the Brentwood Service Center. A few feet away, another tall building housed a small mountain of sodium chloride – rock salt.
“We should have more than enough salt for the season,” Todd Hoppenstedt, director of Brentwood Public Works, said. “If you’re just getting flurries, a salted road could last you for days. We’ll use more salt in a rain event that teeters around freezing than we will in a six-inch snowstorm. We’ll probably use three times as much because you have to keep applying it as the rain is washing it away.”
Hoppenstedt and Buttrey stood in the gray afternoon light, looking at the shiny trucks with the snowplows affixed to their fronts. The vehicles range in size, from pickup trucks to dump trucks, but they’re all keep clean to prevent rust from eating away at the metal.
“They’re built for snow and ice removal,” Hoppenstedt said. “They’re actually built for several things, but they’re adapted to handle snow and ice removal. We factor a 10-year life cycle on those trucks. After 10 years, it may have only 30,000 miles on it, but that’s a hard 30,000 miles. They’re carrying a lot of weight, and there’s lot of stress on the motor and transmission, not to mention the corrosion.”
That Tuesday, today’s winter storm was still several days away, but the Public Works Department was already preparing its crew and vehicles for a busy weekend. Monday’s light icing helped get everyone ready for a bigger event.
“We get a lot of people who move here from the north, and they have a totally different expectation,” Hoppenstedt said. “In Chicago, where I worked, crews would go out 40-60 times a season. Here, we might go out two or three times a season. Even the most veteran-trained drivers don’t have that much practice with snow removal here.”
On Monday night, Buttrey was the third person to arrive at the Brentwood Service Center. He put on a coat, climbed into his regular truck and then headed into Brentwood’s business district to spread salt.
“When I’m plowing, I have the heat on some, and I have the window cracked to have the fresh air,” he said. “But I also like to hear what’s going on outside, especially when we’re plowing. That way I can make sure I’m not hitting anything, there’s nothing wrong with the truck.”
He keeps an ear out for salt sprinkling against snow or ice, and if the truck starts to make a whining noise, he knows there could be an issue with the vehicle. Everything sounded normal as he treated Murray Lane, Granny White Pike, and Maryland Way.
The department’s focus is on clearing state and arterial roads, not neighborhood streets, so emergency vehicles can respond to any service calls they receive. And treating roads takes time. Drivers often need to stop to make sure the snowplow is running smoothly.
“I get out a few times to check how much salt I have, see if everything is running alright,” Buttrey said. “If it’s snowing, I check the windshield to make sure ice isn’t building up. And you have to get out if it breaks down.”
A year ago, a winter storm kept the Brentwood snowplows running for nearly a week. The extreme weather took its toll on the vehicles
“We were fighting equipment breakdowns and trying to diagnose the issues underneath the frozen layers of ice on the chassis,” Hoppenstedt said last year. “We had two large plow/salt trucks go down.”
Buttrey remembers that week. For five days, he practically lived in his snowplow.
“It was exhausting,” he said. “It started early in the evening, and we worked all night long. Sometimes you feel like you’re not making a dent in it. It’s work.”
He smiled. “But it’s fun. Everyone had fun doing it.”
During heavy snow events, like the happening today, residents are asked to stay off local roads. If you must go out, check conditions using Brentwood’s traffic camera’s at http://traffic.brentwoodtn.gov/. A snow route map, listing priorities for snow plowing, also is available at this link.
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