WESTLOCK - About half-a-dozen times a year, Town of Westlock public works staff drop everything they’re doing and head out to clear the roads, a job they’ll complete before doing anything else, unless of course, it snows again.
First, the grader goes out and starts blading roads, creating windrows in the middle that are then deposited into waiting trucks by an oversized snow blower attached to a tractor. The truck drives slowly beside the tractor, until it is full and another truck pulls up alongside to continue the job, and so on, and so on, until every street is cleaned.
The trucks then dump the snow at one of two sites in town, near the town shop or behind the Ramada Hotel, and then head back for more.
Whenever possible, the town crew of seven is utilized fully before contractors are brought in to help out. About $70,000 is built into the operations budget to help pay for the contractors.
At this point in the season, CAO Simone Wiley said it has been a relatively typical year as far as snowfall and it hasn’t been necessary to hire a lot of contractors.
“So far this winter season has been fairly typical. We haven’t had to hire as many. November and December were very mild so we didn’t have to do a lot of snow removal … In January, February, March of 2019, there was a lot of snow and our budget was close to being gone,” said Wiley, adding that laying down sand to de-ice the roads is also a large aspect of the winter program.
Operations director Grant Gyurkovitz also pointed out the contractors are usually brought on for night work, which helps maintain the high level of service residents expect.
“Anytime we do a night-time, downtown clean, which we’ve done three or four times now, we’ll usually have two of our single axle trucks on and we’ll hire two tandems contractors, but once again it depends on how much snow there is,” said Gyurkovitz, as crews had about 70 per cent of the town complete last Friday.
Westlock then received another significant snowfall over Saturday night and into Sunday, so the circuit will begin again very soon.
Crews prioritize roads adjacent to emergency service providers — the fire hall, healthcare centre, ambulance base and RCMP detachment — before they move on to school roads, then downtown and the commercial core roads and then residential streets.
“Anytime we do residential, we do it during the day-time because we don’t want to be waking people up, backing up and everything. Our downtown core, as well as some of the outlying avenues near the downtown core, get done at night-time, but the rest of it is done during the day,” said Gyurkovitz.
“When we get into 24-hour snow removal, like we are right now, I usually end up with three staff that are working doing snow removal, during the day, while the others have gone home to sleep.”
Gyurkovitz went on to say that safety is a primary concern, so the 24-hour shift work is used sparingly, only during big snow events, because the crew is small.
Despite the addition of more clear signage to indicate which day the work will take place, and the snow removal schedule being shared on the town’s website and through social media, there are still those who neglect to remove their vehicles from the street to accommodate snow removal crews. Tickets may be handed out to violators.
Those who have noticed the signs, in the middle of the street with an orange flashing light, have been very positive,” said Wiley.
“We’ve received nothing but positive public feedback on the signs ... It has been getting better over the years, but with the signage change I think it’s going to get even better.”
