Gritter tells of tireless work on the roads

Jan 14 2010 by Amanda Mckendrick, West Lothian Courier

WITH what looks to be the beginning of the thaw upon us spare a thought for the people who have been working tirelessly to keep our roads clear.

Gritter lorry drivers have been working around the clock to keep the county’s major roads open.

Some have been working 15-hour days – yet most workers have reported being abused by members of the public, who have labelled them lazy.

Courier reporter Alistair Watson spent a morning with gritter Stuart Russell to see first hand the hard work involved.

Stuart’s 15-hour shift starts at 8am at the Guildiehaugh Depot in Bathgate.

When I join the 45-year-old father-of-two it is his 15th straight day working these extended hours, meaning he missed Christmas Day and New Year’s Day with his wife Hazel and children Stuart, 13, and eight-year-old Nicole.

Stuart said: “I’m up at 6.30am and I’m not back until nearly midnight. I haven’t seen my two kids at all in the past fortnight.

“I saw them for about 30 minutes on Christmas Day before I had to go to work and when I get back in they’re in bed.

“I’ve been working flat out all during the big freeze, yet some of the stick we get off some members of the public is second to none.

“They shout abuse, swear and stick fingers up at us. It can be hard going at times. We aren’t allowed to say anything back to them and just have to sit and take it.

“I want people to know how hard we’ve been working and what we have to put up with.”

Stuart works one of the 15 prioritised routes in the county which West Lothian Council must clear to keep the primary road network up and running.

The route is programmed into a sat-nav system in the gritter cabin. “The sat-nav tells me what route I’ve to follow, but we know them all off by heart,” Stuart said.

“It can see where I’ve been, what speed I’ve been doing and how much grit I’ve spread. It’s also why when people ask me to do their street that are not on my route I can’t.

“People seem to think we are lazy because we haven’t cleared the side roads. But they don’t understand that all our time so far has been spent trying to keep the main roads clear.

“Every time we get the road clear it snows again and we are back out. Sometimes we have to do the same road six or seven times a day. The only reason we’ve not had any road closures is because we are on the main routes 24 hours a day.”

With the temperature dropping to around minus seven we head out on the route.

A rare snow-free day means Stuart can tackle the secondary road from Harthill to Fauldhouse. But we soon run into a major headache for gritters – parked cars.

Stuart said: “Parked cars are a big problem. People have been abandoning them everywhere. When you go by them you are half-way into the other lane and not getting the full road clear.

“Most of the estates are impossible to get into because of the amount of parked cars.”

Once we reach the route Stuart sets about ploughing the snow and gritting the road, which barely makes an impact on the thick ice. “I’ll probably go over the road six times today,” he said. “It can be tiring work and I’ve not been eating properly because of my hours – I’m living on take aways.

“We can’t stop for a minute as people stop and call us lazy.

“We don’t have a family life just now and we have to put up with verbal abuse and also several windscreens and mirrors have been smashed by kids throwing snowballs and ice at the lorries.

“I would also ask drivers to be more considerate. People don’t have any patience and just fly by us and overtake. But we are ploughing because the road ahead is bad and if they overtake us and then get stuck it just slows us down even more.”