Mail deliveries resumed, but can`t walks be cleared?

By John Howell
Posted 1/18/18

By JOHN HOWELL -- Main Avenue residents are getting their mail delivered once again now that the temperatures have climbed out of the single digits and, most importantly, the snow has melted.

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Mail deliveries resumed, but can`t walks be cleared?

Posted

Main Avenue residents are getting their mail delivered once again now that the temperatures have climbed out of the single digits and, most importantly, the snow has melted.

That’s good news for Sue Rezendes, although it offers little consolation for the week she didn’t get her mail.

Without explanation her mail delivery stopped and, had she not made calls, she wouldn’t have learned she could get it by stopping at the central post office on Strawberry Field Road. That didn’t make her happy, and she only was madder with the explanation that it is too dangerous for delivery trucks to stop on Main Avenue and that, since walks had not been shoveled, home delivery was being suspended.

“You’re supposed to deliver whether snow, rain or sleet,” she said on a visit to the Beacon last week.

She said she has lived on Main Avenue for 43 years; she knows there have been accidents, but that hasn’t stopped the city from picking up her trash and other services from making deliveries.

Others on Main Avenue called the newspaper to likewise report their home delivery had been suspended. One of them accepted the post office’s reasoning but was frustrated when she went to retrieve her mail to be told she would have to wait “because it was on the truck.”

Warwick Postmaster Brian Holt explained that Main Avenue mail was loaded on the trucks, but delivery wasn’t made if there wasn’t a safe walkway to the residence.

In an interview Tuesday, he said the decision not to have mail trucks stop on Main Avenue came in the wake of two accidents, the most recent being in November when a truck was rear-ended and the carrier was thrown out of the vehicle. He said the carrier was hospitalized and has since recovered. He said the other accident occurred in June or July of last year and the truck was flipped over.

Following the accidents, carriers were directed to park delivery trucks on side streets and walk Main Avenue sidewalks. That worked until the first heavy snow of the season. Drifts became a problem, not to mention snow pushed off the streets onto sidewalks. Without clear access, Holt directed carriers to play it safe if they couldn’t reach a resident.

Further, he noted that under city ordinance property owners are responsible for shoveling their sidewalks. He pointed out that the post office does just that on Strawberry Field Road.

“They need to follow the law and clear a path,” said Holt.

He said home delivery service on Main Avenue resumed on Saturday. Holt said he is exploring means of informing residents should the Postal Service have to suspend delivery in the future, rather than having them call when they don’t get their mail.

Rezendes took her complaint to the city, questioning why sidewalks were shoveled on Strawberry Field Road, enabling the delivery of mail when they weren’t cleared on Main Avenue. In an email response she was told the reason why “Strawberry Field Road had sidewalks shoveled is because it is on the Priority Sidewalk List, because it is near a school.” Additionally, she was told Main Avenue is a state road and is to be maintained and plowed by the state.

The logic didn’t sit well with Rezendes.

In an email she said, “St. Rose of Lima [located on Main Avenue] is also a school and over the many years we have lived on Main Ave. and my children walked to school the sidewalks have been plowed. Snowplows go over and over the main road and throw snow repeatedly on the sidewalks. School children walk on Main Ave., which should also be considered a priority list.”

Rezendes reasons the city should mandate that the state take care of their sidewalks on Route 113.

“There are no breakdown lanes and anyone trying to walk from West Shore or Buttonwoods to the Greenwood bridge would have to walk in the street,” she wrote.

Further aggravating Rezendes, she was told by the mayor’s office to call the police department with complaints over sidewalks that had not been shoveled.

Rezendes questioned Wednesday whether mail delivery had been shut down on any other street because it was so dangerous, and she wondered if the Post Office would continue “to shut us down and not even tell us.”

“A notice has to go out and let people know,” she said.

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