Snow removal methods are as varied as the cities where it falls

NYC sanitation truck converted to a snowplow. CC photo: Digiart2001

Municipalities rely on radically different strategies to tame the snow.

It’s snow joke! Snow and its removal can be hazardous to your health, therefore various cities coated in the white stuff have come up with using methods from brute force to high-tech to make snow on icy roads and sidewalks go away.

Cars slipping and sliding on icy roads leads to crashed cars and injured drivers and pedestrians who are in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Traversing sidewalks is no less dangerous to pedestrians who can be seen flying in uncontrolled aerobatics, crash landing and suffering everything from embarrassment to bruises to broken bones to concussions.

For the snow-shoveler it’s strained backs and more far seriously, heart attacks.

Snow removal efforts are as varied as the cities where officials fight blizzard fits thrown at them by Mother Nature.

Since kids do the darnedest things, snow removal teams in Flagstaff, Arizona, have standing orders to check out piles of snow that accumulate around residential cul-de-sacs before plowing them up, because kids have an affinity for tunneling into them and building snow forts in the drifts.

In Beijing, China, in January when only a few inches fell, they used brute force, mobilizing 20,000 snow shovelers, street cleaners and 40,000 paramilitary police and 300,000 volunteers from the youth league of the Communist Party. This January’s snowfall of only a few inches fell was the biggest one-day snow fall since 1951.

Snowplow jockey Bob York of New Castle, Indiana, told AP they follow his dad’s “It’s better to the kill the snake before it bites you,” plan by using trucks that spread salt and sand early to prevent ice from forming under layers of snow.

Whereas most cities cart off truckloads of snow to empty spaces, in New York City, the most densely populated city in the U.S. with nowhere to dump the snow, they employ the use of 20 huge snow-mantling machines that are capable of steam-blasting more than 50 tons of the white stuff an hour. The liquid then runs off into sewers.

Another New York city, Syracuse, has the nation’s highest average annual snowfall. In Syracuse it’s a matter of keeping ahead of the flakes. The city is able to attack snowstorms around the clock, according to a spokesperson from the department of Public Works.

Across the world in Moscow, they’ve gone experimentally high-tech by having the Russian air force intercept storm fronts and bombard the atmosphere with dry ice and silver iodine in an effort to reduce the amount of snow in the Russian capital. According to Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, that forces the snow to fall on villages and towns far from the city, and helps crops grown in those places.

The Colorado capital city of Denver has gone low-tech and lets nature do its thing while tapping into the sun. The average temperatures in the Mile High City are in the 40s, and the city’s tried-and-true official plan is to let the sun take care of the snow. Officials maintain that the warmth of the sun’s rays enables them to save snow-clearing costs as compared to colder cities that get the same amount of annual snowfall.

Whatever the method -- high-tech, low-tech or brute force -- city managers are always on the alert for the most efficient ways to get rid of snow, making the streets safe to travel. Through it all, it's always a relief to know that spring will eventually chase the snow away...until next year.