MONTELLO (WKOW) — After Monday’s snowstorm, Montello claimed some of the highest snow totals in the state.
With nearly 15 inches to shovel, people living in Montello like Kevin Bartos said digging out took hours.
“I’ve been out here most of the day,” he said. “I had three different driveways to deal with and with it being this thick, it goes awfully slow.”
Bartos said he started with his own driveway then moved on to help his older neighbor and then his mother.
“Everybody’s trying to give everybody a hand to get on top of this mess,” he said.
Bartos said he started the process of digging out as soon as the snow ended around 3:00 p.m. and continued until about 7:00 p.m.
Meanwhile, the rest of the town worked to keep up with the falling snow, leaving many businesses closed downtown.
Wheezie’s Town Pump Tavern’s General Manager, Betsey Behling, said she wanted to give customers and employees a chance to clean out their own snow before opening back up around 6:00 p.m.
“Some of our customers gave us a little bit of slack for closing cause they’re like ‘this is the best time to have the bar open. Nobody has school. People are home,'” she said.
Behling hoped opening for a few hours that night would give the bar a chance to cash in on people’s desire to get out of the house.
“Especially, you know, with it getting really cool and now we hope that they’ll come in and still spend some time with us,” she said.
That sense of urgency was noticable on the streets and sidewalks as the town’s four Public Works Department employees worked from 4:00 a.m. into the evening to clean up the snow.
“They didn’t stop,” Behling said. “Our city plows and our county guys were moving nonstop.”
Even people out shoveling said they felt the pinch.
“They say it’s going to drop pretty good so I’m trying to wrap up before it happens,” Bartos said as he looked at his final stretch of snow. “I gotta finish this here and then I can finally call it for the night.”
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