Dale-Time

It’s winter. So far this year it hasn’t been too bad. The snow blower is working and we’ve got a full supply of ice melt. We’re used to snow here in Muskegon. Being located on Lake Michigan gives us lots of lake effect snow through out the season. Usually it’s the light and fluffy stuff that pretty easy to clear away. But we still need to shovel and plow it.

Fifty years ago, when my grandfather first built a parking lot for our funeral home he put a brick wall around the lot. We are located in a residential neighborhood and carved the parking lot out of the middle of the block so I’m guessing the wall was a way of keeping the neighbors happy or some city code thing. Well when you put a wall around your parking lot it makes it tough to plow the snow away. You end up making huge piles that eventually take up lots of parking spaces. That’s OK if you’ve got an over abundance of parking spaces like Shopping Malls or WalMart. But we only have about 65 spaces and we need everyone of them.

So my grandfather and a plumber friend of his designed a snow burner for our lot. It’s basically a pit in the corner of the lot that’s 4 feet deep, 4 feet wide and 12 feet long. There is a snake of 6 inch pipe at the bottom of the pit that is attached to a gas furnace and blower. There is a drain at the bottom of the pit attached to the storm sewer. We plow the snow into the pit. Turn on the Burner and it melts the snow.

Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it. Well it works pretty good, but it’s not magic. The snow doesn’t instantly disappear. So we end up having to “work the pile”. As the pile hollows out underneath we poke at it with a shovel until it all caves in and melts. Our snowplow guy, Ed, who’s been plowing our lot for over 25 years, comes back a couple times a day after a good drop of snow and plows a next section of the pile into the burner and we go through the same process until the pile is gone.

Working the pile is sort of a rite of passage at the funeral home. When we would get someone new, usually a college kid or an older part-timer, one of the veterans would take them out there and show them the finer arts of whacking away at the pile to get the biggest chunk to fall down into the burner. It could be a little dangerous too when it got icy. But you really weren’t a veteran until you forgot where the edge of the pit was and put one leg into the water up to your thigh. You only did that once and you never let it happen again.

When we first put it in, there were several other business around town that installed their own snow burners but they all eventually abandoned them because you do have to work the pile for them to be effective and they just didn’t have the manpower to do it. But for us it continues to make financial sense. I spend a couple hundred dollars in gas and electricity through the winter to melt all the snow. If I had to have it hauled away with front-end loaders and dump trucks it would cost me $750.00 several times a winter. In the last 25 years I’ve only had to have the snow hauled away 3 times when we would get a big dump of wet snow and then the temperature drops and the pile turns into a big block of ice.

So when ever we get visitors from down south I have to show them the burner because they just can’t believe that we have to do that.

I’m Dale Clock. Thanks for listening.