Plowing and salting take priority as snow piles up

As Montrealers muttered Wednesday under the latest layer of March snowfall, the city of Montreal said it was concentrating on clearing streets and salting sidewalks as the flurries continued.

But it remained unclear just when the city would get around to carting away the snow that the plowing had piled up along streets.

“For the moment we can’t answer that question,” city spokesperson Philippe Sabourin said. “We’ll have to wait until the snow stops to make an assessment. We’ll look at how much is still on the ground. We could order a removal operation … but it will depend on a multitude of factors (including) weather conditions to come, how much snow is actually left on the ground.”

Sabourin’s comments follow a 24-hour period that saw five centimetres fall on the city on Tuesday — most of it melting once it hit the ground — followed by an overnight stretch where 10 centimetres fell with at least another five centimetres expected on Wednesday, and two more centimetres overnight.

The city has deployed 1,000 pieces of equipment to deal with the precipitation, Sabourin said, but the plowing and spreading of abrasives on sidewalks and intersections won’t be completed until about eight hours after “the last snowflake has fallen, because obviously streets and sidewalks cleared at the start of the snowfall will have to be cleared again.”

While there were no reports of major accidents because of the slushy conditions, Sabourin warned that drivers should remain careful, if only because some of that snow, flattened by traffic and then cooled by wind or dropping temperatures, could be transformed into black ice.