The city has released drone footage of the piles of broken trees and branches its collected since the Thanksgiving weekend storm that knocked down tens of thousands of trees across Winnipeg.
And they’ve gotten a whole lot of wood.
In all the city says 1,774 tonnes of storm-related wood debris had been dropped off at the Brady Road landfill, two-weeks after a Colorado Low hit the city and parts of Manitoba Oct. 10-11.
That’s an increase of 120 per cent compared to average, according to the city’s manager of solid waste, Michael Gordichuk. The Panet 4R Winnipeg Depot has seen an increase of 140 per cent since the storm.
“We’ve had over 12,000 visits by residential customers dropping off storm-related wood debris at the 4R Winnipeg Depots and the landfill sites.”
The city has previously said as many as 30,000 of Winnipeg’s trees fell during the storm and estimates the cleanup could take a year.
The debris will be “beneficially reused”, according to the city, which said one use for the wood involves chipping and grinding the branches and adding them to biosolids and street sweepings to create a soil-like material for landscaping. Those piles of waste are then hosed with water and left to cure and compost for a year.
The city then either sells the resulting soil to contractors or uses it itself.
The industrial grinder the city is using can grind up to 250 tonnes a day — it will take up to nine days to grind what the city has already collected and more wood debris is expected.
The city expects another borrowed grinder to arrive tomorrow, which it will use at either waste depots.
Winnipeggers can take their wood debris to the 4R Winnipeg Depots, the Brady Road Resource Management Facility, or the Summit Road Landfill.
More information on what to do with the debris from fallen trees and branches can be found at the city’s website.