'Slow-moving' snow-removal process still expected to take weeks to finish: Toronto

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City officials are standing by their Monday estimate that it could take as much as three weeks for Toronto to dig out from consecutive snow storms that collectively dumped 55 cm of the white stuff.

Barbara Gray, the city’s general manager for transportation services, said at a Wednesday media briefing that the priority now is removing snow from key locations.

“The crews that were doing the plowing and salting previously have now pivoted to all doing snow removal,” said Gray.

“Snow removal is a pretty slow-moving operation. It requires our crews to collect the snow into dump trucks and remove it to designated snow-storage sites. It’s going to take three weeks, but we’re hopeful we can get it done sooner.”

Gray said that “even with our crews working 24/7, it is a slow operation. We’ve estimated that time frame based on the volume of snow that we’ve received. Clearing a kilometre of local residential road can be completed in five to 10 minutes with a plow. The snow removal, I’d say, 1 km can take about 10 hours.”

Gray said residents will start to see temporary orange signs from the city advising them to remove their vehicles from the street for 24 hours ahead of the city’s snow-removal equipment coming through.

They may also receive a knock on the door from bylaw officers asking them to move their car.

“The fewer cars that are on the road, the more we can get done,” she said.

When asked about complaints that some sidewalks had not been cleared and salted, Gray said they had — with a proviso.

“The sidewalks have all been cleared at some point, multiple rounds over the course of the storm,” she said. “One issue is that the snow gets moved around. People move the snow around when they are crossing the street. They move it when they are trying to dig out their residences or businesses and so it does then get compacted down. It’s been extremely cold, so when the snow moves around it’s not going to be displaced in any way.”

Gray and Vincent Sferrazza, the city’s director of transportation service, also answered to criticism about how slow Toronto is when dealing with snow plowing and removal compared to a city like Montreal.

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Gray said Montreal’s “very robust program is about double in cost as our program is and they’re also a little bit smaller in terms of area. But they get snow of this magnitude many, many times a season and their program is scaled appropriately for that.”

Added Sferrazza: “We maybe see this (kind of snow accumulation) every three or four years. (Montreal), on an annual basis, will remove snow on an average of 300,000 tonnes a year. We haven’t removed anywhere near that in the last probably 10 years. The last time we removed snow, which was 2022, we removed 180,000 tonnes.”

Sferrazza said Toronto has five snow-storage sites and  four snow melters “placed strategically throughout the city.”