Shovelers dig Blair free from snow's icy grip

When Blazer Anna Meres found out school was cancelled on Feb 18, she didn't catch up on her sleep. Nor did she rejoice over the chance to take a break from her daily routine. Instead, Meres showed up at 51 University Blvd, braving frigid temperatures and a thick blanket of snow on the streets to arrive hours before the sun.

"I had to sleigh-ride up in here," jokes Meres, now standing comfortably in a small cafeteria-like community room behind the SAC on Feb 25. "Don't write that down!" she exclaims as fellow building service workers Marianne Christopher and John Colandreo burst into laughter.

"Yeah, I rode in here with a horse," Colandreo adds jokingly.

Meres, Colandreo and Christopher are part of a dedicated team that shovels Blair's 49 acres of property and 49 entrances while the rest of the school sleeps—a team to whom the words "snow day" evoke images not of a cozy fire but of an eight-hour day of labor that begins before 4:30 a.m. "As building service workers, we are designated ‘emergency personnel,'" explains Building Services Manager James Brown. "That means we have to come to work. Rain, snow, flood—whatever."

The entire staff characterizes the late-February dig as more taxing than most, citing inadequate tools as a major obstacle. "We had only one snow blower for a school this size," Brown explains incredulously as he sits at a long gray table during his 5B lunch break. He adds that the mechanical equipment the staff usually employs was useless in such deep accumulation.

"Mhmm," Colandreo chimes in from his seat across the room. "We did the whole place with shovels and one snow blower. It took at least four days."

Christopher, perched in a plastic chair at the head of a table, nods her head and holds her hand up to her chin. "Snow was up to here at the portables."

The staff is stoic as they matter-of-factly recall the physical toll the shoveling exacted. Meres shrugs and says simply, "Everything hurt. Head to toe, we were sore. Muscles just tightened up, froze up."

Meres, who estimates that each shovel full of snow weighed about 15 pounds, can't even guess how many shovels she lifted over the course of the blizzard. "When we finished at the school," she explains, "we had to go home and do this so we could turn around and come back the next morning."

As Meres begins to discuss the precautions the staff took against overworking themselves and slipping on the ice—two hazards that can lead to serious and even fatal injuries—Brown cuts into the conversation.
"We were ready for this," he asserts, his chin tilting upward as he boasts of his staff's effectiveness. "All of us are old veterans. We knew what we had to do, and we were ready for it."

From across the room, worker Reggie Tobin mumbles, "Some of us are older than others."

Brown chuckles and Meres guffaws in response. Meanwhile, Colandreo gazes out the large, four-paneled window overlooking the Blazer courtyard as a group of students in down jackets and scarves walks down the cleared, snowless path behind the foreign language wing.

Lunch comes to a close, and the group slowly begins to thin out as the building service staff return to their jobs, silently relishing in the fact that their unseen vigilance is the force that keeps Blair moving.