The first wet snow does not wait for the Monday meeting.
The Propane Education & Research Council tells the household to keep a walkway and the tank area clear so company people can reach the tank. See PERC's Safety Guide for Propane Users and the winter-storm pages that tell customers to mark the tank and clear snow with a broom, not a shovel. That is customer work.
The office problem is different. Can dispatch see the path the truck has to use, or is that photo still on one phone.
We built TankSpotter so the path has a dated record the board can open. If you run the trucks, this page is for you.
What PERC is actually saying
PERC's safety guide is written for the people at the house. It tells them to keep heavy snow and ice off piping, regulators, and meters, to keep appliance vents clear, and to keep a walkway and the tank area open so your crew can get in. PERC's winter-storm materials add a marker that sits higher than typical snow cover, so a plow does not guess.
That advice is sound. It is not a dispatch file.
A customer can do the work and still leave you blind. They text "it's clear." The driver arrives, the drift is against the gate, and the next three stops slide. A training transcript does not help. It shows someone sat through a course. It does not show this driveway, on this date, after this storm.
Last night's post on this site was about the fall tank walk that never makes the training file. This is the next layer. The walk is the inspection. The snow path is whether the truck can even get there.
What dispatch actually needs
Picture a Tuesday after a wet snow.
The board has a keep-full list. The first stop is a tank behind the house, down a side path the plow never touches. The second stop is a farm lane the customer thinks is "fine." The third is a tank the marker fell off of last March.
If the only picture of those paths lives in a driver's camera roll, the person assigning the stop is guessing. If the only picture is from October, it is a different property.
A file that holds up has four parts you can find without a scavenger hunt.
1. The account, identified. Not "the green one on the hill." 2. The path. A photo of the walkway, the gate, the tank area, dated. 3. The follow-up. If the path was blocked, what you told the customer, or who you handed it to. 4. A place the office can open without calling the driver who has the day off.
That is dispatch paperwork. It sits next to the delivery ticket. It does not sit in the training LMS.
TankSpotter is a Field Worker OS. The Safety side is the photo and GPS trail. The Training side is a different pillar. Keep them next to each other. Do not mash "snow" and "inspection" into one folder named winter and hope the right PDF comes up when the board is already late.
What this is not
It is not a promise that the truck will roll on a date you did not schedule. The office still owns the board.
It is not PERC's job. PERC tells the household what to clear. Your people still have to see whether it was cleared.
It is not a substitute for a qualified technician. A photo of a path is not a leak check. PERC's article Getting Your Propane System Inspected is still the customer-facing inspection reminder. Do not mix the two.
What to do Monday morning
You do not need a new policy to start.
1. Pull five accounts you know get ugly after the first snow. Can you open a photo of the path from last winter, with a date and a name. 2. Ask a dispatcher who did not take those photos to find them in whatever system you use. Time it. 3. Read PERC's safety guide section on snow, ice, and access. Mark what your crew already captures and what only lives in someone's head. 4. Write one owner for the snow-path file. If two people both think the other one owns it, nobody does.
If those five accounts take more than a few minutes, you already know the work.
Keep the path on the phone that saw it
TankSpotter is a subscription for propane operators who want the photo, the GPS, and the timestamp in one place the office can open. The driver records the path while they are there. The office does not rebuild the path from a text thread that says "it's fine."
We do not plow your customers' driveways. We do not stand in for a qualified technician. Your people still do the stop. The product is the record.
Want to see the access photo next to the rest of the day's work. Request a TankSpotter demo.
This page is general information for propane operators in the United States. It is not legal advice. Confirm your state's rules, your insurer's list, and the current PERC materials before you treat any example here as your requirement. Safety guidance on snow, access, and inspections is PERC's, at propane.com.
Photo by Chris Boenig via Pexels. Used under the Pexels license.