This is a letter in regards to the greatly controversial topic of the late night/early morning snow removal.
I am fully supporting the fact that the streets need to be cleared in order to make things safe for us all, and I’ve been very patient up until now.
One thing that some people may not understand is that for some people it is causing a lot more problems than others may think.
We have a nine-month-old baby boy who was extremely colicky for the first six months of his life and would not sleep throughout the night at all.
For anybody who has not had a colicky baby, you could not understand how difficult it is to go through that.
We finally got through his colic, and after a lot of hard work and sleepless nights, we finally got him to start sleeping and felt a great sense of relief.
Much to our dismay, this is when the nightly snow clearing started.
We live on Vernon Street across from the industrial area and, unfortunately, we can hear the plow crews around all sides of our house, including downtown.
On two separate occasions, we’ve had to get up, get dressed and go to wherever the crews were clearing and ask how long they would be as they are constantly waking up our baby and us.
Not only have we dealt with the constant beeping, but we’ve woken up to them scraping the gravel from the sides of the street, very loudly for a long period of time, while the flood light was shining into our bedroom.
All of this is happening between midnight and 4 a.m. and our baby is constantly not sleeping which is greatly affecting his health as well as ours.
Another problem with this, is that after they are finally finished, and we get our baby back to sleep, that is when the beeping from the loader at the Ready Mix plant starts up for the day. Therefore, we are getting no break from the beeping and noise whatsoever.
I know that it’s hard to make everybody happy, but something has got to give.
I come from a city, and have never had to deal with this before. They would usually do it during the day and just block off certain blocks of the street until they were done.
We have been trying for a year to find a new place to rent with no luck and moving to another town or finding a more expensive house is not an option for us.
I truly hope that we can come to some sort of conclusion that will make everybody happy.
Tiffany Ennis
Nelson