There is no doubt that winter in Alberta this year has been tough on road crews across the province, and Chestermere has been no exception. The endless cold weather and excessive amounts of snow fall with little opportunity for melting has taken its toll on town staff and residents alike. So far this winter, over 2700 hours have been dedicated to snow maintenance on Chestermere roads.
According to Megan Matthies, Communications Coordinator for the Town, Chestermere has six staff who work on snow maintenance and five people trained to run the large plow trucks. The focus of the crews is on snow maintenance and they work to ensure that the roads are safe for people to travel.
Although the Town does not typically remove snow, an exception has been made this year since there has been very little melting combined with a great deal of snow falling. “The Town doesn’t have a budget set aside specifically for snow removal as the costs (of labour, sand, calcium, etc.) are part of our annual roads budget. However, I can tell you that this winter, we have already spent an extra $14,000 alone on sand and salt. In addition, we have had to hire contractors to assist with removing snow from some streets.” states Matthies.
But for a town our size, it seems staff have been quiet efficient in dealing with the roads during this uniquely cold winter. Matthies explains that for equipment, the town has only 3 tandems, 1 small belly plow, and 1-1 ton with a plow and sander, 2 loaders and 2 graders. “As you can imagine, with only 3 trucks and six staff, it can take quite a while to clear even small areas.”
“It takes a very long time to both plow and move snow. Putting up signage, sanding, plowing, loading the snow into the trucks, driving the snow to a dump site, dumping it, and returning to the snow plowing site, all take a great deal of time.” says Matthies.
Crews have to be prepared to get up to start work at any time of the day or night and if it starts snowing in the evenings or in the night, someone will get up around 2 or 3am to do a drive through town to see how much snow has fallen. According to Matthies, their goal is to have the primary routes cleared for the morning commute. “If a lot has accumulated, crews will start plowing in the middle of the night although usually they will wait until there is enough accumulation to warrant going out, but if the road conditions are bad or icy, they would be out sooner (even if it doesn’t snow) to deal with the ice.”
Gord Brookhouse is the Assistant Director of Public Works and knows just how difficult this winter has been to keep up with the fluffy white stuff that most of us have grown to hate by March. “This winter has been especially challenging for our crews. We have had more wind and snow than average and we have hauled snow at least once from all primary and secondary roads.”
Brookhouse adds that plowing and hauling snow is very time consuming and crews ask residents for their continued patience as they work on addressing some other significant residential roads. “Our staff have been working very hard since the first major dump in December and I am very proud of the work they have done for our community.”
With spring only mere weeks away, the weather forecasters are already predicting temperatures above zero by the end of the week so with any luck, the sun will begin to melt all the snow…but not too fast, we don’t want to see a repeat of last year’s floods. Just enough warmth to be able to enjoy the outdoors would be nice.
