Your face got cold this winter. Bryan Beitzel could not care less about your face. What intrigues him is the pavement: Is his pavement still toasty?
Beitzel is the “chief architect” of the village’s new battle plan for ice and snow storms. The department’s maintenance superintendent said he loves spreadsheets, and he spent hours staring at them to figure out where his crews were losing time and miles. One of the keys, he said, comes from the advanced weather data the village now pays a private service to provide, including pavement temperatures.
“I don’t care what the air temperature is, the pavement temperature is everything,” he said. “We could get two inches of snow, but if the road temperature is 40 degrees, we may do nothing.”
The changes Beitzel implemented in the winter of 2014-15 earned Buffalo Grove the American Public Works Association’s 2016 Excellence in Snow Ice Control Award. Beitzel has a spreadsheet that tracks the three-dimensional price of street-clearing —miles they plow divided by the number of inches of snow that fell — and he said costs have dropped from $16.68 an inch-mile in 2010-11 to $11.75 an inch-mile in 2014-15.
And he foresees a day when costs go down further, a day when snow plows and road salt are no longer needed. That, he said, is the day when roads stay toasty year-round.
Q: During a big storm, you are fighting nature — a relentless, heartless opponent. What is it like to plow a street, look in the rear-view and just see new flakes falling back onto what you just cleared?
A: There have been some nights like that. What’s hard for the guys and what was harder for me when I was driving was the winter of 2013-14. We had 77 inches. Every single weekend, we were here. It’s the times when you have to leave a birthday party or a Christmas or an anniversary, or a recital or a game. Our guys are asked to walk away from all of those things. On the flip side of that, everybody who’s here has chosen this as their profession.
Q: Buffalo Grove is criss-crossed by township and state agencies, plus two counties. Is it hard to coordinate how to move your trucks around while avoiding other agencies’ turfs?
A: We don’t want to drag our snow across other agencies’ roads. It is a back-and-forth. We’ll get complaint calls about someone else’s road. We’re just happy to hear that you got out of your neighborhood because those are our roads.
Q: The future of every facet of public works sounds like science fiction. Could self-driven snow-plowing robots be your future crew?
A: I read something a year or so ago that kind of technology is already being utilized in certain, dangerous passes in the Rocky Mountains. But if the day ever comes when that technology is proven out, someone’s going to have figured out a way to take care of these roads without having to plow. Like a solar road that has the ability to self-release heat. Streets that will be connected to the power grid. On sunny days, it will capture sunlight and send that energy into the grid. During snow or ice events, it will draw power out of the grid to warm itself.
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