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“Your lips, your hands, the wind is what really gets you. You get wet and then the wind gets you,” Louisville Water Plumber Leader Larry Reid shared about working in the bitter cold temperatures.
While Heavy Equipment Operator Eric Hollan’s job keeps him inside a mini-excavator or backhoe, he cautioned, “It’s got a heater, but when you’ve got these windows open, it doesn’t do much.”
Winter knocked on our door several weeks early with a couple cold snaps in October, late November, and then kicked off December.
“We haven’t had a hard winter in a long time,” Plumber Leader Mon’Shea Harris said with a little forecasting that we might be overdue for one.
Plumber Leader’s Assistant Mitch Earles agreed.
“I think it’s going to be a rough winter,” he said, talking about the challenges of snow. “It just makes everything a lot more wet. I layer up. I try to get a good base layer that way I don’t have to be in a thick jacket. It’s hard to work in a thicker jacket.”
“The colder it gets, you’ll put on maybe two or three layers,” echoed Plumber Leader Craig Wyatt, who’s worked for Louisville Water for 25 years.
Wyatt led a crew Tuesday morning in repairing a water main break at the same site he worked at on Monday but a little farther down the pipe.
“Sometimes people say if we have a drought in the summer, the ground gets harder, and then we start getting more rain, it tends to maybe loosen the ground up and weak spots (in the pipes) tend to fail more often.”
Digging a hole is only compounded when you add snow into the mix.
Harris said, “The ground is harder, when the snow starts to unthaw, you’ve got more water, it saturates the ground.”
Although the thermometer hovered in the 20s last week, the sunshine helped as Reid’s crew maximized their time to repair a small water main break.
“We try to get in there, get it done, and get out,” and when necessary, Reid said “we get in the truck and take breaks in the heated truck.”
Crews take other precautions, including wearing neck wraps and/or hats, keeping portable heaters on the trucks along with warm water in coolers to wash their hands, and many but not all employees wear gloves on the job.
“I prefer not to (take off my gloves), but a lot of times the material’s real cold and if I have to do anything real tedious, I’ll go ahead and take the gloves off,” Earles said.
Icy conditions throw another wrench into how crews manage through winter to keep Louisville Pure Tap® flowing.
Reid said, “We had a driveway the other day that went straight down a hill. It was all ice.”
Fortunately, Louisville Water has two of its own salt trucks ready to roll out to keep both our crews and other drivers safe in areas where we are working. So, if you’re out and about this winter, please use caution when you’re passing utility and emergency crews.
Some customers go the extra mile to show their appreciation.
“Some people might even come out that we’re not working with (on their property) and bring donuts, cookies, and things of that nature; they might ask if we want coffee or hot chocolate,” Harris said.
And of course, it takes Pure Tap to brew those hot drinks. Remember to have a little patience and rest assured that we are working around the clock to deliver high-quality water to nearly a million people every day.
