Despite the mild weather we have been experiencing, the city’s roads department has been preparing for winter since the end of August.
“That’s when we can identify which trucks we can pull out of summer operation and start to formulate a plan to get them ready for winter,” said Acting Roads Supervisor Greg Perrault.
It can take up to a month for the city’s mechanics to convert the city’s dump trucks into snow plows and sanders.
This long conversion period is primarily for the sanding equipment and gives mechanics time to test the winter equipment that has been in storage all summer. It leaves time to order replacement parts if necessary.
“We generally like to give them about a three-week window to work on them as we pull them out of summer operations to winter operations,” said Perrault.
The plow blades can be installed in about an hour which allows the city to handle early snow falls, such as the 2014 September snow.
“The weather’s very unpredictable here,” he said, “so we are aware of that.”
Perrault said that the kind of snow that falls in late summer and early fall is different and requires different tactics than snow in the dead of winter.
“It’s a heavier wet snow,” he said, “so all we would generally need to do is get a plow put on the truck.”
In addition to the plows, the staff prepare their on-call schedules to ensure that there are always crews ready to go no matter when the snow hits.
“We watch after hours…late at night, early mornings making sure the road conditions are OK,” said Perrault.
The goal is to have overnight snowfalls cleared by the morning rush hour.
“Eight a.m. is our goal,” he said.
The city of Chestermere has four operators for the large snow plows that handle the roads in the city.
There is also one operator for a smaller truck that clears city owned parking lots and clears trouble spots around town such as icy intersections.
Once preparations for winter are completed, crews follow the city’s snow removal policy, focusing on clearing primary and secondary roads.
“We are required to do primary and secondary roadways first,” said Perrault.
“They are used most by our residents so those are what we focus on,” he said.
Primary roads are the main access routes in and out of the city and communities within the city, such as Chestermere Blvd.
“They’re generally our connector roadways,” said Perrault.
Secondary roads are described as connector streets to primary roadways.
The roads department’s objective when clearing the roads is to open a lane of traffic in each direction of travel on the primary and secondary roads.
“Our goal is to make the roadways passable,” said Perrault, “that’s our initial goal.”
Every snowfall is different but Perrault said on average it takes crews between two and three hours to complete the initial clearing of city streets.
Once a passable lane in each direction of traffic has been cleared on all primary and secondary roads, crews begin to widen the lanes.
“We would get our shoulders exposed,” he said, “We would start clearing off snow to expose more of the roadway.”
To achieve these objectives, the city employs a combination of clearing the roadway with the plows and laying down a mixture of salt and sand.
“The sanding and salt helps to provide traction more than anything to the road,” he said.
This mixture works well to provide grip and break down the ice and packed snow to temperatures of about -15 C.
For colder temperatures, a different chip mix of 8mm gyro rock which works better to provide traction in extreme cold.
Perrault is aware of public concerns of the chip mix cracking windshields and said that they try to get street sweepers out as often as possible during chinooks to collect the chip mix from city streets.
A map of the primary and secondary roads as well as the city’ snow maintenance policy is available at www.chestermere.ca.
