Whose fault is it if a snowplow crushes your mailbox in Idaho?

So, it’s February, almost March … and we’re still getting snow.

I mean, we did yesterday, and who honestly knows when it’s coming again? Idaho weather is crazy.

It’s just mind-boggling to me how we can go from such a warm, beautiful weekend, to a few inches of snow in seemingly only an instant.

Fortunately, depending on where you’re at in the Treasure Valley, the sun seems to be doing a great job of removing a lot of the snow for us … but if that isn’t the case for you, you know just how much of a pain the snow-removal can be.

How grateful we are for snowplows, but what happens if a snowplow completely destroys your mailbox? Whose fault is it?

Well, I wasn’t able to find anything online about this at all, so I called the Idaho Transportation Department: District 3 – Southwest Idaho, and I was transferred to a really nice lady who works in the “Information and Road Maintenance Department.”

She told me it’s a fairly rare thing to happen in the Boise area, but it definitely does happen, and it’s typically only a handful of times each winter.

She said, “It’s always treated as a case-by-case scenario because obviously it depends on whether or not the incident happened on a local road, a private road, or a highway. But it’s pretty typical for the snowplow driver who runs into the mailbox to cover it."

Wait, Idaho snowplow drivers would cover replacing the mailboxes themselves? I was little thrown off when I heard that, so I asked her again and she said, "Yes. They usually go tell the mailbox owner they’re sorry, let them know exactly what happened, and then the driver covers it themselves.”

I followed up by asking her if it’s ever the mailbox owner’s fault, and she said it is almost never their fault.

She said, “I personally have never seen it be the mailbox owner’s fault, but I’m sure it’s happened before, and I just haven’t been the one to take that call.”