Stormy
Weather
When it’s time to clear snow and ice
from Alberta highways, Carmacks
Maintenance Services is on the job
Winter in Western Canada
typically means a lot of
highway driving in snow
and ice. If you are a motorist travers-ing
the busy highways in Edmonton or
Calgary, there’s a good chance you have
Carmacks Maintenance Services Ltd. to
thank for keeping the road clear.
Carmacks Maintenance Services is
the highway maintenance division of
Carmacks Enterprises, the Nisku, Alta.-
company that started out 46 years ago as
small, municipal road repair contractor
and has since grown into a large, multi-faceted
civil construction and highway
maintenance business that employs up
to 500 people in peak season.
Gary Brooks is the senior manager for
Carmacks Maintenance Services, over-seeing
the year-round maintenance of
several major road systems in Alberta’s
two big cities as well as in Regina, Sask.
Its Alberta operations include parts of
the ring road highways in Edmonton
and Calgary and the Deerfoot Trail free-way
that bisects Cowtown.
The highway maintenance crews at
Carmacks are busy performing road
repair work in the summer, and in the
winter, their main job is making sure
the roads are safe for motorists.
“In the wintertime, on a typical day
we’ll have our crews patrolling the road-way
monitoring conditions and looking
for a variety of things,” said Brooks. “If
there’s snow or ice, then they’ll respond
with snowplows and sanders.
“If they see any motorists having
difficulties or if there’s debris on the
road or anything like that, our patrol-lers
will react and do to whatever is
required,” he said. “If there’s an acci-dent,
for example, they can assist the
police or the fire department with the
safe removal of debris or a vehicle.”
Tow plows
Brooks says Carmacks’ snow clearing
crews rely heavily on tow plows, a rela-tively
recent innovation than enables
more than one lane to be cleared at the
same time. A tow plow attaches to the
back of a snow-clearing truck and be
can swung out to the side when need-ed,
which puts two blades at work.
“I think they’ve been around for
eight or 10 years, and more and more
contractors are gradually starting to
By Mark Halsall
Photos: Carmacks Enterprises
18 www.albertaheavy.ca
/www.albertaheavy.ca
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