Money in the (snow) bank

BREMERTON — Andrew Knight wishes it could snow 360 days a year.

If that happened, he'd be able to put a lot more money in the bank.

During Christmas week, Knight, of DMK Tractor Services in Bremerton, barely had a chance to let his Kubota tractor cool off.

On Monday, he began plowing snow off driveways and parking lots for local businesses.

"They'd just see me out there plowing and flag me down, and off to the next place I'd go," he told the Kitsap Sun newspaper.

Knight spent Friday digging out car dealerships on Auto Center Way.

He figures he netted $1,000 a day.

"I'm hoping for more snow, absolutely," he said.

The snow may have been a bane for some, but it was a boon for some small and midsized construction and landscape contractors with heavy equipment. They became real entrepreneurs.

Shane Mabry said he spent the day after Christmas on an excavator clearing slush from apartment-complex parking lots. His Port Orchard-based manufactured-home business has been hurting because of the slow economy, but the snow presented an opportunity to do some work.

"This has been a lifesaver for us. We went from really slow to really fast," Mabry said.

Mabry's ad on Craigslist was among 13 under the heading of snow removal in Kitsap County.

Mike Sampson, who owns Worryfree Maintenance Service of Gig Harbor, said he charges $150 per hour and did three or four commercial plowing jobs per day. He said he worked until 9:30 p.m. on Christmas Eve digging out Olympic Village Shopping Center in Gig Harbor.

"This is actually the best December I've ever had," he said.

Paul Severson, of Peninsula Paving Co. of Poulsbo, said he was inundated with desperate calls from clients, many of them elderly, whose driveways were blocked with deep snow.

"Once the word traveled, it just snowballed," Severson said, unaware of the pun he had made.