What’s it like to be a snow plow driver in Chicago?

Curious City

WBEZ Chicago

Society & Culture, Education, Public, Chicago, Arts, City, Radio, Curious, Investigation

4.8 • 642 Ratings

🗓️ 5 January 2023

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A Chicago snow plow driver who’s been on the job for 40 years tells us what it’s like to keep the roads clear of snow and ice. Plus, we find out about the time Chicago made a Floridian class of kids thrilled when we shipped them a bunch of... our snow.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Oh my gosh.
0:03.0	All right, we're waving it down.
0:08.3	Oh, no.
0:09.2	We got to wave back.
0:14.3	Hey, this is Curia City fellow J.P. Swenson.
0:17.7	And that's the sound of me and digital producer Maggie Sivitt trying to flag down a Chicago snowplow
0:23.0	driver. Oh, there's another plow.
0:26.4	And it's parked.
0:28.6	Can we ask you how things are going
0:30.7	cloud in the snow?
0:34.9	He seems busy.
0:37.4	If you can believe it, he seems like he has things to do. He seems busy.
0:40.1	If you can believe it, he seems like he has things to do.
0:45.9	We went out a couple weeks ago during Chicago's first big snowstorm of the season.
0:50.9	And the reason we were out there in the freezing cold, wind, and snow stinging our faces is that we've gotten a lot of questions about snowplow drivers over the
0:55.1	years, including one from this person. Yeah, yeah. So I grew up in Kansas City and, you know,
1:00.5	we get a slightly less severe version of winter weather than Chicago gets. Peter Thornhill lives
1:05.9	in Garfield Park. He's been curious for years about the lives of seasonal city workers. He's wondered what
1:11.9	landscapers for the city do during the winter months and what snowplow drivers do during the
1:16.4	summer months, things like that. But he also has some broader questions. What's it like to be a
1:21.9	city snowplow driver? Both when it's snowing and when it's not. How does the day in the life
1:26.7	of a snowplow driver play out?
	...

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