First female driver joins gritting team to help keep Fife’s roads open

Jennifer McWhirter is a technician in the Passenger Transport Team at Fife Council (Pic: Submitted)

Fife’s first female gritter driver has joined the team deployed to keep the region’s roads safe.

Jennifer McWhirter is a technician in the Passenger Transport Team at Fife Council, and for the first time this winter, she is also stepping in to take some shifts, working as part of the reload gritting team.

It has been kept busy over the past weeks as temperatures have dropped. During the severely cold conditions, the task of keeping our roads safe in such sustained low temperatures has been a challenge and key staff have been working 24 hours a day, seven days a week to keep the road network open.

Additional personnel from other parts of the council are often deployed to work on the road network when required and when weather is extremely bad, arrangements for external resources, plant and equipment are made.

Jennifer's weekday gritting shifts can start any time between 7:00pm and 5:00am, which means when she is on standby, she can be up at 4.30 am, work her shift and then finish just before she walks into the office to start her day job at 8:00am.