By JEFFERSON WEAVER
Staff Writer

Town officials say Chadbourn’s new street sweeper is a “wonderful” addition to the public works department.

“It’s amazing,” said Town Manager Dottie Thomas. “The guys love using it, and it’s making a wonderful difference in the appearance of the town.”

The town council approved purchasing the street sweeper earlier this month. The 1999 machine came from a Tennessee firm, and has been certified to be in good repair. The town paid $49,000 for the sweeper and an auxiliary drain cleaner.

Thomas said the sweeper won’t just improve the town’s looks, but should help reduce maintenance on the town’s storm drains as well.

“By getting the dirt and trash off the street,” she said, “we’re keeping it out of the catch basins and storm drains. That saves manpower and maintenance.”

The street sweeper also has an auxiliary hose designed to clean out catch basins, a task that formerly required hours of manpower and sometimes, an outside contractor. With the street sweeper, one or two workers can clean all the town’s drains with far less cost and effort, Thomas said.

Failure to adequately maintain storm drainage systems can result in fines from state and federal water quality agencies.

“We were always playing catch-up,” Thomas said. “It was averaging one whole day per month, and sometimes we still didn’t get everything. If there was a big rainstorm coming, we’d have to drop everything else to get the storm drains cleaned, especially in the fall when there are a lot of leaves on the ground.

“Some of the catch basins were in such bad shape the sand and dirt were packed down,” she said. “Removing the debris by hand was difficult at best.”

The auxiliary vacuum has no problem with heavy debris, Thomas said.

“It can suck up a brick,” she said. “Just about anything that can get down there, it can pick up.”

While most visitors and residents wouldn’t notice the drainage system unless there was a heavy rain, Thomas said the aesthetic benefits of the sweeper will be a benefit to the town.

“People driving through notice when your streets are dirty,” she said. “If your town looks good, it’s easier for people to take pride in their community.”

Town employees spent two days training on the sweeper this past week, and immediately got to work in preparation for this week’s Strawberry Festival. The N.C. Department of Transportation cleaned Strawberry and Brown streets recently, Thomas said, making the job easier.

“We’re at a maintenance level on some of our streets right now,” she said. “The state helped us out a lot on Strawberry and Brown. The worst is out of the way, and though we’ve still got some more to do, we’ll have all the streets on schedule pretty soon.”

Streets with curb and gutters will be swept the first and third weeks of the month, Thomas said, and those without will be cleaned on the second and fourth.

Thomas said the town’s workers are enthusiastic about a job that once entailed intensive manual labor.

“One of the guys doesn’t want to get off of it,” she said.