The snow started late in the afternoon. We started getting calls from our customers to set up a time to begin snow-removal for their parking lots/company streets. We didn't have any of the sanders installed yet so we couldn't send any trucks out right away. The sanders were large bins with conveyor-belt bottoms that fed sand out the back of the bin. There was a sliding door that allowed you to adjust the amount of sand that was dropped down the enclosed chute onto a horizontal spinner. The spinner sent the sand out in a spray pattern. The amount of sand that got launched and the distance and width of the pattern was controlled by that sliding door, the speed of the spinner (which was controlled by the speed of the engine), and by adjustable plates attached to the spinner housing which could deflect the sand as it came out. The whole assembly could drop down into the bed of a three-axle dump truck and connect to the truck's hydraulic system. With all those adjustments, it was pretty easy to control the size of the sand pattern you laid down. All this depended on the use of dry sand. We actually used a mix of very coarse sand and rock salt. When the sand got wet it did not flow very well. If it got wet and froze, well...the night got very long. The frozen sand would form a crust over the top of the load while the underside of the load was fed out to the sander. More than one rookie driver brought a truck back to complain that the sander was broken when actually he had spread all the dry sand and the crust looked like the truck was still loaded. On a couple of sad occasions, it got so cold that the whole load froze and the sander had to be parked inside the shop for hours to thaw out. But that isn't what I wanted to tell you.

So when the trucks that were set up to carry the sanding units came in from their jobs, we fitted them up and loaded them and sent them on their way. That usually took a couple of hours. On this night we were low on sand, and the loader, a new operator with limited experience in our snow-removal operation, had to scrape the apron around the sand bin to finish the loading. Right next to the road-sand bin was a three-quarter inch river rock bin; apparently in his effort to get a full load of sand, he managed to scrape up some of the river rock, too.

The driver got to our biggest customer's Briargate parking lot, on the North side of The Swirl, and as soon as he got inside the gate he dropped his plow and started up the sander. He was an experienced sander operator and was doing a great job. We had a lot of pressure on us to get done and head to the next site, so he left the deflector plates on the spinner all the way up to get the widest possible pattern. Everything was going fine until the river rocks that were in the sand started getting into the spinner. With the deflectors up, the sliding door open wide, and the truck racing along, the spinner was flinging sand and rocks far and wide. This alone was a pretty bad problem; door glass, windshields, and mirrors of the night shift's cars started cracking and breaking. But when he went to the lower side of the lot, his nose dropped a little and the back of the truck raised a little...and the building, the guard shack, the signs, the bus stops, and anything else that was breakable, started shattering. It was a pretty costly mistake.

And as such things become legend, the perps become legendary. So if you ever run into ole "Machine-Gun Curtis" out here in the Swirling Epicenter, you'll know how he came by the name.