QUAD CITIES - Chances are you probably saw a snow plow driver out Thursday afternoon.
The city of Moline usually has three shifts during the day, but on Thursday, many of its snow plow drivers got four hours of overtime. That way the city runs on two shifts the entire day instead of three.
Moline also pulls people from other departments like the engineering, parks, and sewer departments to plow the streets. Total, the city had 18 trucks on the streets at the busiest part of Thursday.
"All we do is add four hours to their shift," Operations Manager Rich Westmoreland said. "So it's not that bad."
Often times the plows will go right behind one another so one driver can plow the street while the other one follows up by dumping the salt. But when snow plow drivers are spread out, commuters tend to weave in and out of the truck, making it dangerous for the snow plow drivers.
"When we plowed on 23rd Avenue, we had three cars buzzing right by us like nothing," snow plow driver Bill Deadmond said. "If you hit a patch of ice, all three of them could have crashed."
The snow plow drivers recommend cars to stay back 100 feet. They also advise residents to pull their cars off of residential streets to make their jobs easier. At any given time on Thursday, the city of Davenport also had at least 30 snow plow drivers on its streets as well.