With 20 plus centimetres of snow falling across the area over the space of a few hours last week and temperatures plummeting to below normal values, the Parkland is now firmly in the grips of winter.
And for the City of Dauphin, winter means one very important thing. Snow clearing is the main function of the Public Works Department throughout the season and with last week’s weather event, crews jumped on the task of clearing the community’s roadways and sidewalks.
When major snowfalls occur the focus of clearing efforts fall on priority areas, such as the downtown core and clearing of urban highways.
“And the life and safety stuff. The hospital and that sort of stuff,” director of Public Works and Operations Mike VanAlstyne said. “Once we finished priority routes and the highway stuff, then we are doing streets so that the furthest anyone would have to go to get to a plowed road would be about 75 metres.”
Where that clearing of residential streets begins is dependent, VanAlstyne added.
“It just depends on what day of the week it is. If it’s garbage day somewhere, we try to go elsewhere so that we’re not moving around bins and whatever else,” he said. “And then we methodically go throughout the city.”
The city has been running clearing operations around the clock on 12 hour shifts and will continue to do so until the all streets are cleared, VanAlstyne said. When it comes to an event of this magnitude, cleanup should take around 72 hours, he added, assuming everything goes smoothly in terms of staff staying healthy and equipment not breaking down.
And in many cases, other city operations draw staff away from snow clearing.
“We still have to operate our landfill and we need an operator there who is trained to be compliant with our regulations and our license.” VanAlstyne said. “So we’re kind of juggling staff to make it work.”
In the end, VanAlstyne expects the price tag for that 72 hours of work to be average for a citywide cleanup, somewhere between $40,000 and $50,000.
“It really depends on what we end up with and what day of the week, because when you go into Saturday and Sunday all a sudden we’re paying double time on everything,” he said.
“It’ll be 50,000 by the time we remove extra snow because of how much we’ve had to pile.”
Prior to the weekend, all streets had been plowed and work shifted to clearing avenues, as well as removing the windrows from Main Street and the city centre. After plowing is finished and crews have had some time to recover from the long hours, they will finish off the cleanup by lowering some of the big snowbanks throughout the city to improve visibility.
The priority, VanAlstyne said is getting the snow off the streets and people need to be patient while public works crews put the finishing touches on the clean up.
“It’s all a matter of trying to do the best we can with what we’ve got,” he said, adding many city residents do not realize how good they have it when it comes to snow clearing. “We provide a higher level of service - a level of service that’s just outrageously high for the citizens of the city,” VanAlstyne said. “And it would be a lot worse if they were anywhere else I can almost guarantee that.”
