With snow creeping into the holiday weekend forecast, crews with the city of Erie Streets Bureau are about to pivot. They're getting ready to turn the corner from cleaning up leaves -- to clearing away snow.
We tracked a city leaf cleanup crew across an upper Glenwood neighborhood, south of the J.C. Martin Golf Course, where there are plenty of leaves on the ground, in the streets and some are still on the trees.
We saw neighbors like Hayden Kuhn outside, busily raking up leaves for the passing crews to collect.
But as leaves continue to fall, the city streets bureau garage has already switched its trucks and shifts over for the work of salting and plowing, in anticipation of the wintry weather in the forecast for the post Thanksgiving weekend.
The trucks are lined up in the garage with their plow blades on, all in top condition to tackle 300 linear miles of Erie city streets.
And after a couple of mild winters, Erie's salt dome is at capacity, with 8-thousand tons of salt ready to be deployed when needed.
"We switched over to our winter schedule," Streets Bureau Chief Jeff Gibbens said, "so we have employees on first, second and third shifts with various days off and you know we're picking up leaves where we can...and just being prepared for the snow when it comes. We've been slowly putting the plows on, we've had all the salt spreaders gone over. We've had them out on the road, testing all the systems on them to make sure everything's ready to go. We have them full of salt brine. So we're pretty much, we've tested all our equipment, so we're ready to go as soon as it hits," Gibbens added.
If there is a big snow event Gibbens said the Streets Bureau will have 25 plow operators running those city routes on first shift, the shift filled out by workers from the paint and sign and compost departments. They'll combine 2nd and 3rd shifts to have 24 operators on the night shift around the clock.
What the bureau and its drivers ask of you, is to pay attention to the odd - even parking rules, which shift parking from one side of the street to the other, and to give the crews room to do their jobs.