Late Monday evening your Auburn Hills Department of Public Works (DPW) was activated for our first winter operations event. How thrilled we were to be responding for the first time in what was essentially December at that point. Much better than in November, or worse yet, October!

For those who don’t wake up and do this every day for a living you might be surprised to learn just how sophisticated our program and response is. For example there are our snow removal techniques. We also have all sorts of safety measures. In addition to our State CDL requirements we participate in all sorts of training to prepare for events like late Monday night. More about our snow removal response can be found here.

Of course, we would not be very effective without salt. We get ours from the Detroit Salt Company. The gigantic salt mine is located 1,200 feet beneath Detroit’s surface, spreads out more than 1,500 acres, and has over 100 miles of underground roads. Fortunately, no winter operations needed for those roads as the mine temperature stays around 60° Fahrenheit year round. More about the history of salt in Michigan can be found here.

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Our salt is stored in a dome here at the DPW and we are diligent about making sure we have lots of it. Think you can correctly guess how many tons we can store in there? Send your response by 12/18 to  dpw@auburnhills.org. Whoever guesses the closest will be announced as the winner and get a behind-the-scenes tour of DPW operations.

Aaron Stahly, Deputy Director of Public Works