Anybody who shovels a driveway knows it's getting tough this winter to find a place to put all the snow. That problem is extending to municipal works departments.
On any given day this winter, you hear the sound of snow clearing. At the public works yard in Barrie, there was another sound today: the sound of snow melting.
The Trecan snow-melting machine inside the Barrie operations yard was hard at work melting tonnes and tonnes of snow.
“The machine will melt 135 tonnes of snow per hour,” says Dave Friary at the City of Barrie. “We're out of room right now, so it's melting it so we can store more snow.”
The machine melts snow and empties it into local storm water facilities. Storing snow isn’t usually a problem for the city, but there’s been a lot this year.
“We probably have about 1,000 tri-axel truckloads of snow so it's anywhere from 15,000 to 20,000 cubic meters of snow.”
What makes the amount even more mind-boggling is the fact that there are thousands of tonnes more of snow at Barrie’s landfill where 10-to-12 trucks make 10-to-12 trips a day dumping snow on snow-clearing days.
The cost of melting the snow is substantial, Friary says.
“The machine will go through about 5,000 litres of fuel in a shift,” he says.
That contributes to a cost of more than $7,000 per shift, however that’s less expensive than trucking it elsewhere to stockpile.
