Man and machine helping others

Jason Loeffler, driving a pickup truck equipped with a snowplow, has been clearing roads since 9 a.m. on Tuesday. He eventually had to stop at 1 a.m. Wednesday, when he couldn’t see across the road.

“We tried to keep up last night,” Loeffler said after resuming his work Wednesday morning. “It was more dangerous than anything. There was no visibility. I hit a drift about five feet high, I spun out and had to call a couple guys to rescue me.”

For most of Wednesday morning, Loeffler, an East Dundee resident and heavy machine operator for Palumbo Management, worked to clear Christina Drive, which leads to an East Dundee business park, closed because of the weather.

Much of his work, though, has been getting cars out of the waist-high drifts that piled up along Route 72, making portions of the major east-west thoroughfare impassable Wednesday.

“In the past two hours, there’s been 15, 20 cars get stuck,” Loeffler said. “I’ve pulled four cars out of here already. That’s all we’ve done all day. Between last night and today, if I can get 10 bucks for every car I’ve gotten out, I’d be a rich man.”

Even as he spoke, a compact car was buried up to the roof in the middle of Route 72. No one had bothered to dig it out. A Daily Herald delivery truck was stuck in a couple feet of snow on the other side of the road.

“The worst part is they can’t clear the road with the cars stuck,” Loeffler said.

He anticipates having to help clear Route 72 using Palumbo’s big front-end loaders, saying East Dundee probably can’t do it by itself.

“They don’t have the power that they need,” Loeffler said. “I’m waiting for a call from my boss to say East Dundee needs a front-end loader. I’ll be busy with that all day.”