The winter road crews at the City of Airdrie have been getting a bit of a break this winter with less snow falling to then clear up, according to Mike Avramenko, Roads Department team leader.
“Obviously, when it’s a nice winter it goes well for us. This is a little bit of a break, for sure,” he said.
The proof is in the numbers, according to Avramenko.
“If I compare the calendar years 2014 to 2015 in terms of accumulation, in 2014 we had 131 centimetres (cms) of snow and in 2015 we had 98 cms,” he said. “There’s some savings there because we’re about 30 cms shy. Historically, we budget for between 110 and 120 cms of snow, which is about $1.2 to $1.3 million.
Avramenko said 45.7 cms of snow had accumulated in Airdrie between Oct. 1, 2015 and Jan. 11, 2016. During the same timeframe in 2014 to 2015, the accumulation was 75 cms of snow.
The lower accumulation doesn’t mean City crews are sitting around waiting for snow to fall, however.
A number of the employees on Avramenko’s crews are cross-trained on the water services side and can assist with anything that needs to happen there, including repairing breaks in waterlines.
“We try to find them alternate, viable, productive work including things like pothole patrol,” he said.
As well, there’s more to what the crews do than what residents are used to seeing them doing – plowing city streets during a snowstorm.
“When you have extended time between the next event, it gives you time to go into the residential areas and do a straight blade. We also start picking up windrows on the priority two (routes),” Avramenko said. “You’ll see that the snow starts to pile up on the priority ones on the islands and we’ll start getting to those to remove that in anticipation that winter is not over.
“If we can get to some of that snow there that’s accumulated, that gives us an opportunity to store more for the next event and if that never comes, then it just melts down to nothing and has less of an impact.”
Avramenko said there have been savings to the City because of the mild winter in terms of fewer overtime hours for crews, fewer equipment maintenance bills and lower fuel costs. As well, so far this winter, he said the City has also not had to hire any contracted services to help the regular crews.
“We have seven truck/plow sanders, two graders and three loaders. We run four 24-hour shifts and each shift has six staff members, so 24 guys on winter operations plus two co-ordinators.”
