Posted on 02/09/2015 6:27:08 PM PST by MinorityRepublican
The snowploughs are out in force in Boston, where 1.5m (61ins) has fallen in a month, but Mayor Martin Walsh says the city is running out of space in which to dump it. How do other snowy cities get rid of it?
The most common solution is dumping it where it can melt away. Last week, Chicago endured 48cm (19ins) of snow. As it piled up along roads, some of it was hauled away to 500 sites around the city - car parks and other empty spaces.
In Minneapolis, they haul snow into one large empty publicly owned space, according to Mike Kennedy of Minneapolis Public Works. But taking snow away with trucks is expensive and slow, he says. In nearby St Paul in 2011, city workers hauled and stacked so much snow into one empty spot it became known as "Mount Midway", which didn't melt until May.
Boston has similar sites they call "snow farms", but those are filling up and the city is considering an extraordinary measure - using the ocean. After two back-to-back massive storms in 2010, Baltimore ploughed snow right into the city's Inner Harbor. While this may seem like a no-brainer for cities near water, the practice is frowned upon for environmental reasons.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
move south away from those hellholes. no ... wait ... they may come here. never mind ...
I’ve always heard they just dump it all into the ocean. Couldn’t imagine it harming anything more than runoff from rainwater.
I lived in Baltimore in the late 1980’s and the city just dumped snow in the harbor from trucks. Then the environmental types put an end to it. So, the city started building huge mountains of snow, which melted, and the melt water ran into the harbor. In the 2000’s they ran ran out room, even after building a mountain at the former Memorial Stadium site. They brought in gas fired snow melters which deposit the melt into the storm drains, which then run into the harbor. In 2010 the city just said screw it and got permits to dump into the harbor again.
Not in Portland, OR!!!!
They WON’T Plow.
They won’t salt the roads.
Instead they worry about “contaminating” the ocean with the salt.
Look it up!
Solar powered melting?
Wait a day or 2 for what?
.
“rain goes into the waste treatment center through the storm sewers. It is treated just like household sewer water. That is a requirement from the EPA.”
No, it does not. It’s been a requirement to separate storm water for sewage. When storm water does get into waste streams, you end up having big overflows.
Regardless, the regulations require that the water be stored so it will not cause an over flow. This has required the building of tens of billions of dollars in storage tunnels.
I live outside of Boston and have around 4 feet of global warming sitting outside with snow still falling.
The mountains on the sides of the driveway are so tall my old snowblower won’t reach any higher.
Did he require urinary and rectal catheters and collection bags be installed on all the fish, and other creatures living and relieving themselves in the harbor and adjacent ocean?
Maybe in your neck of the woods. But I worked in a 10MGD waste treatment plant and while the delivery systems — the sewers themselves —were separate for storm and sanitary, both were treated in the same influent stream. It’s true that heavy rains could overflow the system and divert directly into the river. And when that happened, the paperwork ...!
“Around here we call that june”
Lol.
yep!
“Maybe in your neck of the woods.”
Well, I stand corrected. But that sounds like a system waiting for disaster. Oh wait, you mentioned the paperwork!
Actually, most rain does not dump directly into major bodies of water. The earth is a very large and capable filtration system, which is made less effective with pavement and sewers.
Therefore, it actually makes environmental sense to NOT send rainwater directly off of pavement and into the rivers and lakes. Not sure that means putting it in a wastewater treatment center, but doing so is a lot like allowing the earth’s natural filtration do the job.
In Virginia, we are required to have rainwater collection facilities, which often are just grassy “pits” where the water can build up and hopefully then seep into the ground, getting filtered on the way to the aquifer. If there is too much rain, then it runs off through a pipe near the top of the collection pits, so sediment can settle to the bottom.
Our HOA parking lot had a treatment facility at the lower end, where there were rocks under the ground covered with dirt, such that rain would run onto the grass and then soak quickly into the ground and get filtered through the rocks.
Anyway, I don’t think having a generally good plan for filtering should preclude just dumping snow into the ocean in emergency situations. Just wanted to counter the argument that suggested it was a silly concern.
Good idea for drought stricken areas.
That is what I was thinking, piss on it
Here in Boulder they push it towards the center on my street. Priuses and small cars can’t cross it :)
When resources allow, they bring a giant snow blower out and dump it into rows of 18 wheelers.
The next day the city comes out to repair the geysers created from the broken water mains from the weight of those big trucks filled with wet snow. Then Public service comes out to repair the broken gas mains.
If they wait a day the sun melts it anyway.
Must be a union function.
The belief is when you push water that has been polluted into nearby waterways you are adding toxins into the water. Many think toxins are better handled if they are allowed to seep into the soil. Recent construction standards often include adding vegetation around the site designed to keep toxins close to their source
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