City of Saskatoon says new snow removal measures successful
The city of Saskatoon says its snow removal crews have already taken more than 600 truckloads of snow off city streets.
Following last weekend's dump of snow in the city, officials said crews were able to clear all main thoroughfares —classified as Priority 1 streets — within 58 hours. Typically, the city aims to have these types of roads cleared within 72 hours of a snow event.
Pat Hyde, director of Public Works, credited the city's new snow clearing pilot projects with the fast work.
"In terms of what we are trying differently this year, it's probably more than any year previous," Hyde said.
Hyde explained that prioritizing city streets for snow clearing, employing new snow-melting chemicals, like a magnesium chloride blend with sand-salt and using concentrated pods of snow plowing crews to work through areas of the city are among new measures the city has undertaken this year.
Hyde told reporters on Thursday afternoon that the city also plans to put real-time tracking devices in all its snow plows in order to give citizens up-to-date information about snow removal in their neighbourhoods.
"What we've been doing so far has actually worked the way we expected it to. The test will be through the duration of the winter because we are not through all the extremes. We haven't had an extreme cold ... so far it's been going quite well," Hyde said.
Prioritized streets
The city says it deals with salting, sanding and grading streets in this order:
- Priority 1: Highest traffic streets and major roads like Circle Drive, 8th Street, 22nd Street, College Drive and access roads to fire halls, hospitals and other emergency service sites. The city aims to have these cleared within 12 hours of a snow storm.
- Priority 2: Streets near emergency service sites, like fire halls, as well as rapid transit bus routes, Clarence Avenue, Taylor Street, Ruth Street, Fairlight Drive, McCormack Road, 37th Street and Centennial Drive. The city aims to have these cleared within 36 hours of a snow storm.
- Priority 3: Bus routes, roads around schools, main streets like Emmeline Road, Main Street, Wiggins Avenue, 29th Street, Forrester Road. The city aims to have these cleared within 72 hours of a snow storm.
Less complaints
The city also people are not complaining as much this year as they were last year.
"One of the metrics for seeing how we perform is actually a complaint basis," Hyde said. "How many calls are we getting into our customer service centre, how many email complaints do we get and considering the type of snow event we had last weekend where we had the freezing rain, the ice and the snow on top of that, we had very few."
Another 15 to 25 centimetres of snow is expected to fall in Saskatoon on Thursday.
