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February 7, 2005

King of the road | When the big storms hit, Bruce Gilbert and his Maine DOT co-workers keep the highways clear

By Taylor Smith
At 7 p.m. on a January Wednesday, the temperature is falling and meteorologists are forecasting one to three inches of snow in Portland. Bruce Gilbert, an eight-year veteran of the Maine Department of Transportation's Scarborough plow crew, punches in and fires up his patrol truck. More than 1,500 DOT employees at roughly 100 facilities scattered from York to Fort Kent are responsible for more than 8,000 miles of DOT-controlled highways and roads during winter storms, but a two-mile stretch of I-295 in Portland ˆ— the entrance and exit ramps between Exit 5 and Exit 8 ˆ— is all Gilbert's.

I meet Gilbert a few hours later at a Mobil station on outer Congress Street, a frequent stopping point for the plow trucks from the Scarborough DOT facility. By 9:30, the snow is coming down fast and it's sticking. I climb over a winched-down wing plow and into the passenger seat of Gilbert's truck. Gilbert, 56, sips the one cup of coffee he says will tide him over until his shift ends at 3:30 the next afternoon, and apologizes that the heat has conked out.

He pulls out of the Mobil and continues his route, silently dropping the front and side plow blades and pushing the light, dry snow off the pavement as he guides the truck around the Exit 5 on-ramp. DOT's rumbling, 27-ton wheelers handle the highways, leaving the exits and the finishing work to trucks like Gilbert's, a 17-ton behemoth with two plow blades and a cab full of levers and buttons.

At 9:55, after making preliminary swipes at half-a-dozen ramps, Gilbert meets another plow, driven by one of his 16 Scarborough-based co-workers, at the Mobil station. Gilbert says he's worried that the employment numbers in Scarborough will start to drop because of the difficulty of attracting new hires. (Later, Maine DOT spokesman Herb Thompson says the department's pay rates range from $9.21 to $14.41 per hour ˆ— Gilbert says drivers rely on storms like this one to pad their paychecks with overtime ˆ— and that its maintenance budget this year fell more than seven percent, to $272.4 million.) "Our wages have been frozen for two years," says Gilbert, using his shirt sleeve to wipe away the condensation that's gathered on the windshield. "Who would want to come drive trucks with this kind of responsibility for less than $10 an hour?"

A crackling voice comes across Gilbert's radio at 10:20. A box truck traveling south on 295 slammed into the end of a guardrail just beyond the Franklin Arterial exit, bending the heavy guardrail about five feet out into the passing lane. Gilbert tells the dispatcher he might be able to use his plow to knock the metal off the road. But when Gilbert gets to the scene, he realizes his light composite blade is no match for the twisted metal.

Gilbert lets his truck idle on the shoulder behind a Maine state police cruiser, its flashing blue lights warning motorists to stay clear of the accident. Rolling down his window, Gilbert asks if the trooper wants him to wait until a DOT crew arrives with a cutting torch. Without hesitation, the trooper says yes, grateful that Gilbert's truck will shield him from the traffic whipping by on the snow-covered highway.

A few minutes later, the crew arrives and cuts off the hanging piece of guardrail, rolling it into the median. After they leave, followed by the state trooper, Gilbert carefully plows along the edge of the guardrail, sweeping away any debris in the road, then heads back to plow the exits he's neglected for the past 20 minutes.

At a few minutes to midnight, Gilbert pulls into the Mobil parking lot to drop me off. The streets are considerably more quiet than they were three hours ago, and the snow is starting to taper off. Asked if he'll take a break ˆ— maybe to eat a quick meal, or warm up after spending hours in a truck with a busted heater ˆ— Gilbert shakes his head. "This is pretty expensive equipment to keep idle," he says.

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