City holding off on residential snow cleaning a while longer

Despite the slushy and soft snow making driving in residential neighborhoods not very easy, the city’s director of infrastructure operations says the weather is too warm to clear away snow just yet.

“Next week, once the temperatures dip, we’ll be getting into the residential neighbourhoods,” says Mark Beare.

Beare says the weather is too warm yet for crews to begin cleaning residential roads, and says it would cause more problems for drivers.

“If you can picture the Big Leplowski going through your neighborhood, it’s a heavy piece of equipment, so with the soft 5cm snowpack we have right now, the heavy vehicles loaded down are going to create ruts and they are going to push the snow off to the side and create windrows.”

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The mild weather didn’t get in the way of Strathcona County beginning their residential snow removal earlier this month. Beare says they have different service standards than Edmonton. “The service standards in those municipalities is to blade it to bare pavement and remove the snow and that’s not the service standard in Edmonton,” he says.

When asked if there is an ideal temperature for crews to begin clearing snow he said “it’s not an exact number” but added prolongted periods of -5ºC or colder would be ideal.

“It takes about 2-3 days per neighbourhood and about 14 days to do the whole city. If the weather doesn’t change and it is continuing to be unseasonably warm, we do have a plan to get in there and do the best we can to clean up the residential neighborhoods.”

“Edmontonians care a lot about their snow removal so we are doing the best job we can within our service standards and right now we have some unseasonably warm weather for January. Typically we would have cooler temperatures and wouldn’t be experiencing this.”