Empire Crushing LLC

About Empire Crushing LLC

Snow in the Southern Tier comes down overnight and fills the valley by four in the morning, the hills above the interstate gone white before the plows are warm. Empire Crushing LLC takes that early shift around Painted Post — plowing driveways and parking areas, cutting walkways open, laying salt where ice sets up hard against concrete. A town wakes on a schedule, and the whole point of the work is that the schedule holds: cars out, lots passable, nobody stuck at the end of their own drive. There is a strange quiet inside a storm, just headlights and blowing white and the blade doing its job, that is hard to explain to anyone who has not worked it. From Painted Post through Corning, Erwin, Riverside and Gang Mills, that is the night.