Given the nature of Grande Prairie’s recent snow dumps, amounting to more than 60 centimetres, the City of Grande Prairie has given some further explanation into what snow removal looks like on the swan city’s roads.
According to Mayor Jackie Clayton, snow removal has been operating throughout the city, including working “24 hours a day” during the past weekend, completing all priority one roads, nearly finishing all priority twos, and finishing all “Week A” neighbourhoods. Still, windrows left behind from snow clearing has caused some significant concerns among residents; however, Clayton maintains they will be addressed in due time.
“All of our equipment is out working, they continually will work over the next few days to get caught up in areas where we’ve had significant snowfall,” she says. “Following the original equipment, there comes a second group of equipment where they’ll come and remove windrows, and that sometimes takes a little bit longer.”
With large windrows and slippery roads in several Grande Prairie neighbourhoods, the Mayor says one way to open up traffic in your area is to ensure all vehicles are removed from snow routes in neighbourhoods.
“I do encourage people to be very aware of the fact that parking is banned in residential areas where they’re about to clear snow,” she says. “We are asking people to remove vehicles, we understand that some people park on the streets and that, in an area where residential snow removal is happening, becomes a problem.”
Chief Operating Services Officer for the City of Grande Prairie Brian Glavin explains one of the most significant challenges snow-clearing crews continue to face is simply the sheer volume of snow hitting the city day after day. Despite this, he explains some mitigation strategies are underway to help ease the burden on the city’s regular snow-clearing crews.
“It is a priority of ours to get to all of those, the challenge right now is just the pure volume of snow,” he says. “We brought on additional contract trucking and that makes sure that our blowers are running all the time, [and] we’re constantly keeping it running and trucks are constantly taking snow away, which improves the efficiency of the operation.”
Glavin also took a moment to describe what exactly snow-clearing looks like on a daily basis. He says priority one roads are usually completed within 24 hours of the end of a snowfall, followed by priority two roads which include bus routes, and finally with priority three roads which include the industrial areas of the city.
“Residential gets done with contractors, and contractors start at the same time as the priority two roads would,” he says. “It takes about five days to get the priority two and three roads done, and about ten days to get the residential roads done.”
Despite the city’s efforts, some residents have taken snow clearing into their own hands. Glavin says while this is not unheard of in the winter, clearing snow from anywhere other than driveways and sidewalks is against the city’s bylaw.
“I know things happen from time to time where people take things into their own hands, we do not encourage that, it is against the bylaw,” he says. “Depending on the volumes of snow it can take longer to get those windrows out of place, we can’t get rid of them any sooner.”
Glavin adds that measures are taken by crews to ensure regular traffic flow; however, some residents will have to deal with re-routing and delays, especially when large windrows are present in a neighbourhood.
“What we try to do is everywhere there’s an intersection, making sure that is open so we’re not impeding the flow of traffic in an intersection, but what it does cause is people who need to cross a road to get into their property to have to go further and find an alternate route back the other way, which obviously is frustrating if it has to go on for a long period of time,” he says.
When it comes to the monetary impacts of snow clearing, Glavin explains it costs the city around $250K every time crews complete a residential snow removal cycle, but there is “sufficient budget” to ensure safe roads during the cold season.
