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County Crews Busy Cleaning Up After Storm
Monday, March 5, 2007--City roads around Iowa are improving each day, now the focus has shifted to reconnecting hundreds of rural routes back to civilization. Clearing roads sounds simple enough, but dozens of Iowa's county workers are tackling drifts as high as their trucks. In Greene County, Kevin Bauer has been busy for four days, sun up to sun down. "I've worked at the county now for twenty years, and this is the worst one I've seen," Bauer said. He's cleared twenty snow mountains inside his giant Greene County blower by mid-afternoon, and doesn't expect to finish for a few more days. "We've got some of them that are 14, 15 feet tall," he said. Besides the blower, twelve massive v-plows are also widening roads that look more like narrow snow canyons. Jefferson-Scranton schools remained closed on Monday because officials didn't want students to navigate the now-single lane roads.
Worker dies in snow-blower accident
Hunter Mountain - A ski resort employee was killed Monday night when he was sucked into a snow blower, state police said.
Walter Rion, 63, who worked at Hunter Mountain Ski Resort, was pulled into a running 6-foot-wide snow blower after his clothes got caught in its blades, state police in Catskill said.
He was standing next to the machine while trying to close an overhead garage door when the accident happened about 8:30 p.m.
Rion, of Prattsville in Greene County, died at the scene.
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Snow Blower Hand Injuries on the Rise
The snow that fell Thursday was extremely heavy and very thick. That can be rough, even for a snow blower. That's leading to a high number of hand injuries to people trying to unclog their snow blowers with their hands. It's hard to imagine just how powerful these blades are, but shove a broom handle in the way and the wood will be no match for the inside of a snow blower. Dr. Jan Bax says it only takes a split second to suffer a massive injury. "It just cut it up into match stick-size pieces and just shredded it," said Bax, a doctor at the Hand and Upper Extremity Center of Northeast Wisconsin. Dr. Bax says he's been busy since Saturday. So far his clinic has seen 28 patients, and most lost a finger because of a snow blower.
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