Mild winter fine with Snow Boss
A year ago Bob Dunford’s crews couldn’t keep up with massive dumps that paralyzed the city
Bob Dunford is absolutely fine if people forget about him, his signature wide-brim fedoras, or his ultracool “Snow Boss” title.
“It’s important to get our message out, but it got a little bit too much last winter,” said Dunford, Edmonton’s director of road maintenance, who commands a $45-million budget and a workforce of as many as 800 whenever major snowstorms blow into town.
Dunford and his hats were centre stage last year, when mammoth snowfalls clogged roads, left cars buried under windrows, and put the city $30 million over its snowremoval budget. A massive pile of hauled snow in west Edmonton didn’t fully melt away until September.
Dunford doesn’t expect a repeat of Snowmaggedon this year, but city workers aren’t exactly twiddling their thumbs waiting.
“We’ve been doing potholes, we’ve been doing litter, which is kind of nice,” Dunford said. “You know how you get that melting snow revealing all that litter? Hopefully you won’t see that this spring.”
Crews have also been repairing guard rails and fences, Dunford added. And after four freezing rain events last month, workers were busy refilling 180 community sandboxes twice a day. But a slow winter has also allowed workers to use up remaining overtime hours banked last winter.
Apart from two days in November and four in January, Edmonton has had an abnormally mild winter, said Environment Canada meteorologist Dan Kulak, who refused to speculate beyond a seven-day forecast.
“We can come up with five different excuses or reasons, but does anybody really know why the past few months have been the way they are?” Kulak said. “I’m not sure we can really prove that.”
For the past 30 years, February has been Edmonton’s driest month, Kulak said. The current trend of sunny skies and temperatures in the low pluses and minuses will continue through Sunday. And while there might be some snow and a temperature drop next week, it’s not likely to be enough to cause too much grief. But forecasts can always change.
“Eventually, something’s going to come through,” Kulak said. “It will turn, and it will catch people off guard because it always does, because they get complacent.”
The University of Alberta is hoping to avoid nasty weather and accompanying budgetary pressures. Between April 2010 and March 2011, the university spent $300,000 more than it’s $500,000 budget. Spokeswoman Tobie Smith said crews have spent $200,000 this year, mostly on ice removal and sanding, with money ready for a massive snowfall in February or March.
At the Edmonton International Airport, temperatures hovering around the freezing point haven’t exactly let maintenance staff off the hook.
“It may seem like a non-winter, but it’s still winter for the airport,” said spokeswoman Sarah Meffen. “The freezing rain on runways is a very difficult weather condition to manage, probably the worst.”
Temperatures between -4 C and 4 C make it extremely tricky to keep runways free of ice. Staff have to apply a chemical antifreeze with “an extremely long name I can’t remember,” Meffen said.
For environmental reasons, they
We’ve been doing potholes, we’ve been doing litter, which is kind of nice. You know how you get that melting snow revealing all that litter? Hopefully you won’t see that this spring.
Bob Dunford, Edmonton’s director of road maintenance
recapture as much as they can, but it’s a labour intensive process.
Balmy weather hasn’t affected snowblower sales at Scona Cycle and Sports, or at least not yet.
After selling out their entire stock last winter, owner Rudi Zacsko once again ordered about 120 Honda snowblowers last June. There’s a bit of crystal ball gazing in bringing in inventory, Zacsko said, since machines take about three months to arrive. Once they sell out, they sell out.
Weather-wary Edmontonians snapped up nearly the entire stock in October and November, but Zacsko managed to track down another 18 machines from a Medicine Hat dealership. “But then it absolutely stopped,” Zacsko said. “In the last five or six weeks, I sold one single unit.”
With a dozen snowblowers left, Zacsko isn’t expecting them to move quickly. By this time of year, customers shrug off the few remaining centimetres of snow and hold out for spring.
“It would take an awfully big snowstorm before people would start buying again,“he said.
But if that snowstorm hits, Edmonton’s fedora-wearing Snow Boss will be ready. Dunford isn’t making budgetary predictions for 2012 just yet, recalling a similarly mild January in 2006, followed by 48 centimetres of snow in March.
“You never know what’s coming,” Dunford said.
“The weather is something we definitely can’t control.”