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 ...
More coming Thursday.
I’m just outside Boston too and like your location there is nowhere to put this stuff.
The roads get more and more narrow each snow fall. Its maddening.
My hometown in Indiana saw plenty of lake-effect snow. They just pushed the stuff off the roads, people dug themselves out, maybe a real mountain or two, but mainly just let it melt away.
I remember one particularly large mound in the 70’s that almost made it into May before the last, gray piles finally drained away.
Here in Seattle they had banned the use of salt in the sanding trucks for environmental reasons. Until a school bus full of kids ended up sliding down a hill and ended up with the front end hanging over a 50-foot wall.
My young son at the time said “Environmental reasons? Puget Sound is salt water!”
Our church just barely made it for the new rules for building a new building. We needed a larger retention pond to account for the new building (and therefore less wooded area for rain to naturally seep into).
What we ended up doing was putting in an underground vault in addition to the existing pit. The vault is under the parking lot, and something like 30’x100’x20’.
The new rules would have prevented us from building the new building as they called for even larger storage capacity - larger than what the property had space for! The site still has more wooded/grassy area than paved or building area. Goofy.
It is expensive, but would your city have accepted the new porous asphalt? It allows the water to seep through, and therefore acts more like natural turf.
Porous asphalt? Seems like it’d be vulnerable to freeze-thaw cycles, unless it can somehow retain nearly constant resilience over a wide range of temperatures. Around here, even traditional asphalt takes a beating in the winter.
I tried to research this a little on the internet and didn’t find much — most of the “winter” concerns seemed to be about not loading the porous asphalt with sand (blocks the voids), etc.
I have a friend a bit west of Boston, they are in aggghhh! mode about now...
“I’ve always heard they just dump it all into the ocean.”
All this does is shift when the water goes into the ocean. Not whether.
In the railroad industry, the wise yardmasters gathers up every available open top hopper car to load the snow into and when full waybills that cars to the south.
I would love to see a mayor just come out and say, “I guarantee the residents, all of this snow will be gone by the end of the fiscal year on June 30th.”
Then just walk off the stage without taking questions.
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