WESTLOCK – The seemingly never-ending job of snow removal has been a “challenge” for Town of Westlock crews who’ve completed close to three full passes of the municipality since the first major dump in mid-November.
At town council’s Feb. 14 meeting, operations manager Robin Benoit called winter 2021/2022 “interesting” saying they’ve dealt with everything from sub -30 C conditions and high wind chills to huge dumps of snow and freezing rain — it took eight days, hundreds of hours and a little more than $100,000 to clear the streets of Westlock following the Nov. 15 blizzard which dumped 20 centimetres of snow on the region.
As per his report to council, Benoit said their most recent efforts started Dec. 26 and following a subsequent blizzard in January a third round was needed. He also noted that for five days last month they shut down work due to the extreme cold as when the temperature dips below -30 C, crews are parked as per town policy.
“It’s been an interesting winter. We’ve had lots of snow and have been through the town almost three times on a full program, so it’s been a challenge,” said Benoit, noting in his report that capacity at the snow dump north of the public works shop is becoming a concern and they’ll be making space at the West Industrial Storm Pond site to use as overflow.
“The recent freezing rain also created some surprises for us. We had some ice dams build up beneath the compacted snow and it’s been a challenge for the grader to cut the ice, so we’ve switched out our grader blades to ice blades to help combat that a bit. But we can’t put too much force on those ice blocks, or we’ll rip the surface of the asphalt off as well.”
And while the recent upward swing in temperatures has been welcomed, it has created an issue with drainage. During their most-recent efforts, a grader, loader, street sander (supplemented with a rental unit), rental tractor with town snow blower, two sidewalk plows, a backhoe, single-axle truck, tandem truck, and three hired tandem trucks have been used.
“We found that some culverts and some of the storm sewers were blocked with ice. We had one storm sewer with 28 metres of ice inside that created a bit of flow issue,” said Benoit, noting a number of culverts were almost completely blocked by ice. “So, it took some time to clear out. The new flusher-combination-hydrovac truck has been a huge asset for dealing with those things.”
Mayor Ralph Leriger said he knows it’s “been challenging” for crews and gave credit to the department for the recent free-sand program that rolled out last month.
“That was a good decision and something we need to remember for the future. Lots of people have taken advantage of it,” said Leriger, noting he’s been alerted to a high number of slip and falls on sidewalks due to the freezing rain.
Meanwhile, bylaw enforcement remained busy throughout January issuing 53 tickets specifically involving snow-removal bylaws — development services director Krystle Fedoretz told councillors during her report that in a typical month enforcement handles roughly half as many files in total. Previously, Benoit said having the streets free of parked vehicles saves approximately 20 minutes per block.
“When you look at the number of 70 files, just to quantify that a busy enforcement month is around 35 files. So, it was very busy obviously with snow removal and snow removal related to traffic in the month of January,” said Fedoretz.
