Before dawn on Friday, truckloads and truckloads of snow were being added to the massive snow dump in LaSalle.
“Montreal received a lot of snow this winter. Actually, we have 135 centimeters. That’s 50 centimeters more than usual,” said city spokesperson Philippe Sabourin.
Heavy duty snow blowers send snow high into the air to the top of the pile, 24 hours per day. If they don’t maximize the space, the dump will be full in no time.
Earlier in the week, the city had to stop shipping snow to LaSalle because the blowers couldn’t keep up.
That slowed down the operation in Cote-des-Neiges-Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, which has had the slowest snow removal of all the boroughs after storm that dropped 36 centimetres last week.
READ MORE: NDG residents call for better snow removal
“We were so fast doing our snow removal operation that we didn’t have enough time to stock the snow efficiently,” Sabourin said.
The city is expecting the last loads from Notre-Dame-de-Grâce to arrive at the Angrignon dump by the end of the day Friday.
Workers will then get a bit of a reprieve. They’ve already tackled four snow removal operations, when last year there were five all winter. The city could end up over its $157 million snow removal budget if this keeps up.
“We have enough money to cover five operations, so money is not an issue for now,” Sabourin said.
According to the Environment Canada forecast, 15 more centimeters could be on the way early next week.