When it comes to the level of snow removal service the city provides, residents should lower their expectations, according to the city's operations superintendent.
"Over the years, some residents have come to expect immediate relief after a snow fall," said Bill Gaal, in a highly anticipated report to council about this winter's plowing operations. Council will discuss the report during Monday night's meeting.
The city's snow control policy was set in the early 1990s, following decades of minimal budget allocations for snow clearing and sporadic service, said Gaal's report.
The purpose of the service is to "maintain streets and sidewalks in passable condition," and is not "intended to or eliminate all hazardous conditions at all times," he wrote.
Gaal cited a mid-December storm, where 43.6 centimetres of snow fell between Dec. 10 and Dec. 12, 2013. This was followed by rain.
During that time, the city logged 598 calls for service. "The calls were from all areas of the city, and the common theme was 'their street needed to be cleared first,'" said the report.
While the goal is to take an average of five days to clear a 15-cm snowfall from the city's 1,485 lane kilometres of roads and to open 20,000 driveway entrances, the Dec. 10 to 12 snowfall took eight-and-a-half days due to having to redo the top priority roads over and over again.
It cost about $650,000 to clean up, with city staff putting in 3,563 person hours, said the report.
"The city's snow clearing efforts have not changed," said Gaal. "What is changing is the weather events and volume of snow per storm event, and more importantly, resident expectations."
A graph included with the report demonstrates the amount of snow to fall in a calendar year and the number of snow-related calls to the city in the past 10 years. In 2004, the city received 985 calls for service when 227.5 cm of snow fell. In 2013, 256.3 cm of snow fell and the city was called 3,021 times. The city has already received 850 calls in the first two weeks of 2014.
"It is not economically feasible to have all situations cleared the first day of a snow fall," said Gaal's report. "There is neither the resources, nor the financial capacity, to do that. Most residents understand that during snowfall events the travelling public will be, at times, inconvenienced."
Contractors are also used to the tune of "every available grader, at least seven front-end loaders and sufficient dump trucks to haul snow," but there were difficulties getting a hold of graders in December, Gaal wrote.
"Private contractors may have lucrative opportunities in the resource sectors," he wrote. "In general, there is a lack of skilled operators in the community, which means that even though there may be graders in the community, the equipment owners do not have operators to operate them."
