Back to work

Things have been picking up with the fire department. A couple of weeks ago the guys had a professional come in to show them how to correctly use a chain saw. Unfortunately, he dropped a tree on a beautiful blueberry bush. The owner thought it needed pruning anyway, so no harm no foul. Not a week later they had a call for a chain saw accident. Rule of thumb: Chain saws and ladders do NOT mix! The guy didn't do the ultimate Darwin award manuevre of putting the ladder on the part of the tree he was cutting off, but close enough. When the tree branch freed it came around and swung at him like a baseball bat. He did an endo and fell about 20 feet to the ground.
Car accidents are the number one foul weather call the guys get. We live on T Mountain and the whole town is a series of hills. Most of our roads are unpaved which helps with maintenance and allows to flatten frost heaves, etc. The rest of it needs to be diligently salted, sanded, and plowed. I paid almost $7g to Morton Salt earlier this month for our first of many loads of road salt/sand.
Not sure what happened last night. The weather reports have been saying rain turning to snow turning to rain... for over a week. That is the worst of the worst because it usually means that we end up with no one's friend- ice. The temperature has slowly been rising from the teens and early twenties up to the thirties over the last couple of days. Later last night it started to snow. We got about two inches before it warmed to the upper thirties and turned to rain. Result? The inch to two of snow was now a block of ice. Even better the plow trucks don't come out for just a couple of inches so the roads were coated. Why they didn't salt or sand I am unsure. Budget concerns could be a possible reason there. So many of the town's budgets in NH were depleted last spring due to all the snowstorms last year, and just budget cuts in general. Add to that our town is getting less (as are most towns) money from the state and federal governments.
The guys were toned out at about 10:00pm for a motor vehicle accident on the North side of town. The car had bounced off a tree and was laying in the middle of the road. It was so icy they had a hard time getting the engine up our main road (state route). They determined that was in a different town, but before they could even ease their way back to the station there was another call so back out they went. Then a third. He got home after midnight. No major injuries, but it makes for a restless night wondering when the next call will come. Luckily it warmed to about 40 by the middle of the night and was raining hard enough that it must have washed the snow/ice mess away.