Not much rest for weary Austintown road crews

AUSTINTOWN —  They sat in the break room at noon at the Austintown township building, eating their lunch and cracking jokes, four weary road department workers who seemed in good spirits despite their heavier-than-usual workload.

Or maybe they were just punchy from lack of sleep. “Most of us have had only two hours’ sleep,” Dan Megown said.

They left work at 6 p.m. Tuesday and returned to the roads at 2 this morning. They were planning on staying out until 6 p.m. again and expected they would be out in the wee hours Thursday morning to clean up some more after Mother Nature’s winter wrath.

“We try to plow when there’s less traffic," Mike Cook said.

The downtime of a winter road crew worker: Leave work at 6, lay down at 8 and be too wound up to sleep because you know you have to go back out again, complained Rick Lewis, who showed the callouses on the sides of his hands from his extra efforts.