Augusta Street Department

About Augusta Street Department

Augusta sits at the meeting point of the Whitewater and Walnut rivers, and on a January morning the crews are out well before the sun clears the bluff east of downtown. The Street Department runs the plows down Main first, then works out toward the school routes and the bridges over both rivers, where ice forms fastest. There's a particular satisfaction in a street scraped clean to the yellow line before the first commuter turns a wheel on it. By midmorning the cottonwood bottoms along the Walnut are still white, but the roads into town are bare and salted. It's steady, unglamorous work — plow, salt, repeat — for a town that counts on getting to work and school on time.