Admitting that communes across the country have been unable to cope with the large amounts of snow that have fallen over the past few days, Luxembourg officials have hired dozens of Belgian friteries to take over the job of salting the roads.
“Around midnight last night, we had a meeting to figure out what to do,” said Daniel Schnéi, a former snow plow driver and current head of the Office of Snow Preparedness. “Even if we got the roads cleared, we knew we wouldn’t have enough salt to melt all the ice and packed snow.”
“The boys and me, we put our heads together to find a solution, and that’s when [fellow driver] Manny [Franco] said, ‘I think we need to call the salting professionals,’” he added.
Georges Denis, owner of Friterie Georges in Arlon, says that around 3:30 a.m. on Thursday he received a call asking him to join the efforts to salt the Grand Duchy’s hundreds of kilometers of snow-covered roads.
“I didn’t give it a second thought,” he said. “Even since I bought my four-meter-tall shaker and five tons of salt back in 2013, I’ve dreamed of a chance like this.”
Experts estimate that Belgian friteries possess half of the world’s salt reserves, much of which they liberally sprinkle on the frites — also known as French fries or chips — they serve.
