Yellowknife city streets, sidewalks still covered in snow week after storm

Yellowknifers arecomplaining about the amount of snow still piled on city streets after a hefty snowfallon Remembrance Day.

Last Wednesday, the city saw about eight centimetres of snow, followed by about four more centimetres over the next two days. Not a huge storm by some standards, but according to the city, dealing with that amount of snow in a short period of time was a struggle for crews.

On Facebook, residentscomplainedthat dangerous sidewalks and bus stops still haven't been cleared, nor have their residential streets.

Snow removal in Yellowknife is handled by city staff, so we spoke with Chris Greencorn, the director of public works and engineering.

The following interview has been edited and condensed.

Why is there still so much snow on the ground?

It was a significant snowfall event and we have our resources that are allocated every year for snow removal and that's basically what we employ when there is an event, so because of the volume that we got in a short amount of time, we struggled a little bit to keep up specifically with the removal side of things.

Our priorities are emergency routes and transit routes and the main thoroughfares in town and then we get to secondary streets. While it may have looked like we couldn't get to every residential street in town, the crew was out focussing on keeping the main drags clear.

What do you mean by "struggling"?

I guess struggling wouldn't be the best word. But we removed as much snow as we could with the equipment and the manpower that we have allocated. When there's a large event like we had last week, sometimes it's hard to keep up with that kind of volume.

Eventually we will catch up to it, but it's just kind of a cat and mouse game when you have that type of volume.

Was there just not enough staff to handle the snowfall?

I guess so! That's kind of a difficult question. The city budget is based on norms or normal amounts for the winter, or average amounts. So that's what we base it on, and if it varies from year to year, we adjust accordingly.

People are complaining about sidewalks and bus stops that are still dangerously packed with snow, do those get prioritized like streets?

Public works has limited resources. All those additional removals and stuff would require extra people or someone contracted out to do it, so we basically do what we can with the resources we have.

So sidewalks and bus stops are considered additional?

When we've got that type of volume, absolutely. The city has to prioritize the snow removal on the most important things first. We put our manpower to the most important aspects of snow removal first, which are emergency routes and main thoroughfares.

Most of the snow piled up is on the side of the roads, where cars were parked during and after the snowfall. Many cities in Canada have parking bans, is this something Yellowknife has considered?

In my time in Yellowknife there has not been a parking ban considered. That would be something that would be a council direction.

While we understand that there was frustrations last week with the amount of snow that came down, we are a winter city and in my experience these types of events happen from time to time and generally speaking, it hasn't really been an issue before. I'm not sure why this year has caused a significant increase in frustrations.

If we're a winter city, why can't we handle a significant snowfall better than we have?

I think we've handled the snowfall very well. Again, we budget based on average snowfall amounts. If we were to budget based on events like last week, our snow removal budget would be a lot more. So then we would be under public criticism for budgeting for events that may or may not occur.

The city realizes and understands the frustration of residents when it comes to large event snow removal, but again we work within our means and what's within the budget, so I guess we ask for patience and understanding when it comes to things like that. Any increase in service requires an increase in cost, whether it's the city doing it or a contractor. In these times of cost of living discussions, these are things that we ask people to keep in mind.

Ten centimetres over a few days is considered a large event?

It's a large event in a short amount of time for us specifically for snow removal. For us to handle that sort of volume all at once, it was a struggle, but our crews did a good job,. And we got a lot of compliments as well in as many complaints we got, we got a lot of compliments from residents as well.