Five straight weekends of icy temperatures and falling snow are testing our neighbors’ good humor, but most maddening to many residents is the city of Denver’s failure to clear its secondary streets.
Snowplow sightings in city neighborhoods are few and far between, and each new storm makes the local streets look like Iditarod routes – only icier.
Just before the second big storm hit, Mayor John Hickenlooper announced that a fleet of smaller plows would hit neighborhood streets simultaneously as larger plows cleared main arterials. But for many residents, the plows never came and the roadways have turned into rutways.
Bill Vidal, Denver’s manager of Public Works, said 50 light plows hit neighborhood streets during that second storm, but they were not dispatched during the three more recent snowfalls. That’s allowed each storm to pack more snow onto an icy base. The city doesn’t activate the smaller plows unless the forecast calls for 6 inches or more, followed by cold weather. Though about 6 inches fell Sunday in parts of the city, the forecast called for warmer weather.
Vidal concedes that most neighborhood streets still have “8 inches of ice on them.” This isn’t acceptable a month after the first storm. Some 100 to 120 pieces of equipment are mobilized each day for street scraping. But they can only clear 100 to 200 blocks a day, and with 14,000 residential blocks, our ruts are going nowhere fast.
Dropping a little sand on side streets might be helpful. But the city says only large plows are capable of spreading its sand-like material, called “ice slicer,” and they’re too big to fit down snug side streets. With warmer temperatures this week, some icy streets are likely to soften and turn to midday slush. Vidal should send out the small plows to clear the worst of the ruts before they re-freeze at night. Let’s end the cycle that’s been crippling traffic and damaging undercarriages for more than a month.
Mobilizing both fleets costs money, Vidal said, and before Sunday’s storm the city already had spent about $2.8 million on snow removal this year and well over $6 million since the first storm. The city had budgeted $4.3 million for snow removal this year.
“We’re on your side,” Vidal said of those having to maneuver side streets. “We’re trying to make it better. We’re throwing every piece of equipment and person we got at it.”
Except, of course, when they don’t.
Typically, Denver’s snowiest months are the warmer stretches of March and April when the snow melts before our very eyes. But that’s more than a month away. First we need to navigate through five weeks of January and February. Thursday looks good.
