Fairmont Street Department

About Fairmont Street Department

Somewhere in the small hours of a snowfall, while the houses along the lakes are still dark, the Fairmont Street Department's plows begin their rounds. Route by route the town comes back — the school streets, the blocks around the Martin County Courthouse, the long avenues that carry people to work — each one opened before the first commuters back out of their driveways. It is work almost nobody sees and everybody depends on. By the time the sun comes up over the frozen lakes, the grid is drivable and the morning simply happens, the way mornings are supposed to. That ordinariness is the achievement. Clearing the city's streets is the Street Department's winter charge, and Fairmont moves because of it.