WINNIPEG – The city says it would be too costly for snowplowing crews to clear windrows from back lanes: homeowners will have to keep doing it themselves.
Several residents complained last winter that snowplows were leaving behind massive icy walls of snow, prompting Transcona councillor Russ Wyatt to introduce a motion to reexamine the city’s snow clearing policy.
City officials produced a report Friday detailing how costly it would be to have city crews do the work.
It notes that the city’s 885 kilometres of back lanes are cleared by front-end loaders making a single pass, at a cost of $250 per kilometre. Clearing the snow piled along the sides would require blowers working in tandem with dump trucks, pushing the cost to $6500 per kilometre.
The report says officials also considered using smaller equipment to remove windrows from back lanes, but that was expected to result in “significant damage to private property” in back lanes lined with garages and fences.
The city says residents experienced more difficulty clearing their windrows last winter because the weather was particularly severe. With little room to store all the snow that piled up, many residents pushed it back into the lanes where it became compacted and then plowed back up into tall, rock-hard windrows.
“When you have big chunks the size of your back window, what are you going to do?” Ron Desmerais said to Global News in February. He bought a snowblower after he hurt his back moving the big piles of snow. “I have carpal tunnel issues, back issues, and I got no one to help me out.”
The city’s Public Works committee will consider the report at a meeting at city hall Nov. 25.
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