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3.6. SR 02-03-1997'ity of iver MEMORANDUM FROM: DATE: SUBJECT: Mayor & City Council Pat Klaers, City Admi~r~tor February 3, 1997~I/ Snow Removal Update ITEM 3.6. Street/Park Superintendent Phil Hals will be in attendance at this meeting to provide the City Council with an update on recent snow removal activities. Attached for your information is a 1/21/97 Star Tribune article on snow removal activities in suburban communities. Phil Hals in quoted in this article. It should be noted that the city is running low on its sand/salt material and has ordered more salt (we then mix the sand with the salt). We have approximately 100 ton of sand/salt in stock which is sufficient for about two reasonable snowfalls. The weather forecast service which the city uses is Weather Watch and this service is noted in the attached article. The last few days we have received a small '%teak" from the ongoing snow which we seem to be receiving almost daily and this has allowed Phil and his crew to work on clearing out some intersections and to assist MnDOT with some snow removal work on Highway 10. \\elkriver\sys\shrdoc\council\snwupdt.doc 13065 Orono Parkway · P.O. Box 490 · Elk River, MN 55330 · (612) 441-7420 · Fax: (612) 441-7425 le the Twin Cities area is enjoying a weather respite, snow removal remains a top concern. Metro-area cities follow differing recipes for dealing with this winter's nearly 50 inches of snow, but they have the same goal: getting rid of it. Snow removal 'is not an exact science' ~y Paul Levy netonka's director of operations of the next are as different as sand tar Tribune Staff Writer .After being blanketed by al- ~.,o. st 50 inches of snow so far this qBter, some Twin Cities collilnu- ,ities have exhausted their street- all supply, while others have ex- ~ausled their patience. Still, snow-removal crews plow head, preparing for the next ,~lorm and an accompanying bliz- Zard of complaints. ~. "Y,o,u can't get organized too ~,arly, ' said Brian Wagstrom, Min- 't street maintenance, whose crews began discussing this winter's snow-removal policies Oct. 22. "When it comes to snow removal, everybody's an expert on their particular piece of street aud property, and every community has a different approach." While tile amount of snowfall varies little throughout the metro area, tile budgets, number of ve- hicles, attitudes, chemicals and weather services used for snow removal from one community to ~~~ t ~STAR TRIBUNE and salt. "This is not an exact sci- ence,'' said Tom Struve, Eagan streets operations manager. "We consider salt environmentally unfriendly while other cities swear by it. We use Weather ~,5, atch, a private weather service; other cities rely on radar or TV. Turn to SNOW on B2 for: -- Resources used for remot,al. Also on B2: -- Bracing for more snow attd possible flooding. TUESDAY, JANUARY 21 , 1997 Star Tribune Photo by Cheryl A. Meyer Kurt Schlegel, a street and equipment maintenance operator, plows snow in one of the many cul-de-sacs in Eagan. The truck has a reversible front plow, an oversized wing and-an underbody plow for better efficiency. SNOW.from B1 Methods of snow removal as different as sand and salt "Every city has the same goal ~ tO clear the streets of snow. But..not every city does it the s.ame* way.' S~irid vs. salt '-~though sand is considerably ctih.a'per than salt -- the Minne- sot.a..:Department of Transporta- tio~'pay~ between $2 and $2.50 fora-ton of sand and $28 per ton of.~alt -- many communities pre- fef_~/alt. Others swear by sand. And,some use calcium chloride, but ~aringlv at $200 per ton. )Bwokl3;n'Park, fearing clogged stor~a sewer pipes, uses an aver- ag.e'~0, f 3,500 tons of salt per year but very little sand. :~hgan, by contrast, uses be- mrgen 3,000 and 5,000 tons of sar/deach year, but only 1,200 to 1,6~0 tons 6f salt. :.B~cause salad must be swept aWf't' after the snow melts, salt may*be more cost effective, said G~on Surges, Brooklyn Park's stti~el superintendent. ::But communities on heavy salt di~t~ may pay in other ways this ye~.r~ Due to the unusually high ar~ount of snow, many commu- nit~es have surpassed their sea- so'txal allotment of salt. .-*Through the first week of lan- ua~rT]; Brooklyn Park already had usa'at 3,000 tons of salt, and Sti/'gbs anticipated that he would be fGrced to order more. :~.T. he problem is waiting for it?..he said. "There's salt to be hifl):but you have to hope it ar- rives~ before we get hit with an- othi~r big storm." ";Kt least one community adds sand to its salt mix for cosmetic reasons. · ~The salt does the work," said Phi! .Hals, Elk River streets and par~ superintendent. 'But if the drivers can't see the brown color on the street, they're not satis- fied. They need some visual as- surance that something's down there." TV or not TV Some communities, like Edina, rely primarily on cable TV reports and radar to predict the weather. .But 19 metro communities, in- ciO'ding Minneapolis, pay $150 pe£month to a small local service called Weather Watch, which uses~.computer or fax to send de- talle.d reports and often alerts creW,vs about storms in the middle of-the night through pagers and voice-mall. 'Amy Rolando, a former WCCO-TV meteorologist and founder of Weather Watch, said, "By 'offering a very detailed breakdown of the day, in three- hour segments, the users know what ldnds of materials to use." The Minnesota Department of Transportation, responsible for plowing state and interstate high- ways, uses the Burnsville-based Kavouras Inc. weather service, which issues forecasts for flights worldwide and does a tailored forecast for the metro area. The department also has its OWn radar and its own weather information service and monitors five local TV channel~. ';Weather is not an exact sci- ence, ~ said Norm Ashfeld, the de- partment's highway superinten- dent for the metro area. "We can use all the help we can get. ~ Some communities get extra help by supplementing crews and machinery through contracts Getting rid of snow Here is a list of some of the resources cities in the metropolitan area.. useo ~ 1996 for snow removal ~ Number of Budget Number ;i snow-removal fm snow To~s of To~s of of miles ; CRy vehicles removal salt sand plowed* :; Chaska 12 $54,000 350 1,800 76 ' Hastings 11 $230.000 350 3,000 78 Brooklyn 29 $687~235 6,000 400 to 214 Park 500 Mpls. 90 $6.4 million 20DO0 to 18,000 to 1DO0 22.OOO 2O,000 Deephaven 6 $20.000 120 480 50 St. Paul 75 $4.,5 million 21,000 35,000 800 Savage 14 . $100,690 550 800 75 Forest Lak, e 6 $25,000 75 700-800 30 "Ooesn'[ include cul.de-sacs and public lots. with private companies. Minnetonka uses contractors to plow out four of its fire sta- tions. Elk River uses privately owned plows for cul-de-sacs, while Chaska hires outsiders to plow rural areas. Other communities prefer to avoid contractors. "With contractors, the service level decreased .... "said Brook- lyn Park's Surges. "They don't~ know the area the way our people do ~ and the public is not shy about letting us know it." Meltdown As snow levels rise and blood pressures reach boiling points, a blizzard of desperate and highly creative telephone calls to com- munity snow-removal umts often results. For example: An Elk River woman asked that her street be plowed so she could get to the grocery store because "her dog was tired of eating scrambled eggs," Hals recalled. Surges said: "They tell us, 'You've got to plow my street first because I'm handicapped, I'm sick, I've got to get to the hospi- Star Tril~ne gra¢,hic tal, I'm late.' One person called to complain that we knocked down a mailbox and then called hack an hour later to complain that we didn't plow close enough to the mailbox." Some complainers should save their frostt' 1 hreath; they're call- ing the wroag offices. Municipal, county and state plowing units have responsibility for different roadways in many communities.. Struve, Eagan's streets opera- tions manager, said that commu- nities dealing with parked cars have difficulty doing efficient jobs, "The perception is that there's a fertile crescent in the western and southern suburbs," Struve said. "It's not the [snow-removal] budgets that are so different. It's the number of two- and three-car garages, which mean very litt. le on-street parkJng. ' But officials say no matter what they do, resider ts are more likely to complain than compliment. "Everyone wants to be the first to be shoveled out," Surges said. "There are 62,000 people living in Brooklyn Park, and each one gets more snow than anybody else." i iles and piles to go before it melts Around Minneapohs, St. Paul a])d the suburbs, crews have run out of places to put the snow- and they're talking about spring flooding. By Mary Lynn Smith Star Tribune Staff Writer As weary plow crews are run- ning out of patience with repeated salvos of winter weather and out of space to put piles of accu- mulating snow, not even the dis- tant promise of spring offers much hope. Municipal engineers already are bracing for possible flooding when the meltdown finally comes. ' Until then, crews have taken adi.,antage of recent cold but dry weather to repair overworked equipment and make room for the next onslaught. And overseers of the public dollar are breathing a sigh of relief after wiping out their 1996 snow budgets. Minneapolis otiicials had to tap $2.4 million from a contingency fund by December's end, spend- ing $6.4 million for snow and ice control for 1996. "It was the single largest expenditure for snow removal," said Brian Lokkesmoe, director of operations for public works in Minneapolis. St. Paul, which budgeted for tbur snow emergencies in 1996 but had seven, spent an extra $I.15 million on top of its $3.4 mil- lion snow-removal budget. This may be the worst snow season in at least 35 years, said Dan Schact, maintenance and operations engineer for Ramsey County. "At this point, we've run out of places to put the snow," Schact said. "All we can do is try to push it up higher .... But some- times you can't." Crews in Minneapolis, St. Paul and some suburbs are using dump trucks to haul snow out of down- towns and busy commercial dis- tricts in an effort to move parking out of the driving lanes and pro- vide better access to meters. Minneapolis crews have worked nearly ever3., night since Dec. 8 removing snow from 150 metered blocks, Lokkesmoe said. Crews also are cutting doan the mounds of snow at 24,000 corners throughout the ciD; in an effort to improve pedestrian access and visibilit3,. Gary Erichson, St. Paul street maintenance engineer, said crews have cleared downtown curbs four times this winter. They've also swiped snow off some major thor- oughfares and other problem areas. But waist-high sn6wbanks lining residential streets will re- main until they melt. "The windrows there are get- ting bigger, and it's going to be a problem," Erichson said. "We'll keep trying to push the snow up, but the streets are narrowing .... We can't haul all the snow out of this town. We have no place to put it and no money to do it." Suburban crews also are push- ing snow off the curbside and rearranging piles in cul-de-sacs. Meltdown woes Some public works crews figure thev'll have another set of prob- len~s with the meltdown. "Frozen drains," said Carl Rice, Lakeville street superintendent. "That's where we see a lot of prob- lems. A lot of flooding." Crews then will be sent out to thaw the storm drains. "That will probably occur in another 30 days." It also will be about the time that forecasters begin predicting potential flooding problems. The National Weather Service is scheduled Feb. 28 to offer a gen- eral outlook for potential flooding. By mid-March, forecasters expect to estimate how much the rivers ~11 climb and where they will crest during the spring melt. On Thurs- day, Gov. Arne Carlson asked the Legislature to set aside $20 million for snow removal and flood control. Through Friday, 47.7 inches of snow had fallen at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport since Nov. 15. The airport receives an average of 50 inches during an entire season, said Gary McDevitt, a Weather Service hydrologist. More importantly, the water content of the snow is higher than usual, he said. But McDevitt says it will de- pend on much more snow falls, how quickly it warms up and whether the meltdown is accom- panied by rain. A fast warm-up coupled with rain could be disas- trous, he said.