OK, it's not black diamond, but Jamaica Plain gets its own ski slope
By adamg - 1/14/11 - 9:05 am
Needs a touch of grooming.
A concerned citizen posted this photo of Spring Park Avenue at Centre Street to the city's Citizens Connect site this morning:
The plow operator for this public lot completely blocked the adjacent sidewalk with a huge mountain.
Comments
dump it in the river?
Cities that regularly get as much snow as we did on that last storm have a drastic solution to this problem. They cart it out of town and dump it in the ocean / river. New meaning to the words flotsam and jetsam.
Betraying my automobile-centrism, I was more scandalized by street lights completely obscured by snow. I guess we've all just learned how energy efficient these new LED streetlights are, no waste heat to melt snow.
Snow picks up lots of salt,
Snow picks up lots of salt, sand, motor oil, gasoline, etc. When it melts and goes into storm drains there are at least some catch basins and other means of filtration before it hits a body of water. Directly dumping snow into the harbor would be a disaster for water quality and somehow I don't think the EPA/CLF/MASSDEP would be too happy.
Nothing magical happens in
Nothing magical happens in storm drains. All those petrochemical pollutants are directly transferred downstream. "other means of filtration" is an nice way of saying "soil contamination." Makes you love cars even more, right?
Probably illegal to dump in the water
Whether or not you were serious about dumping the snow in the water, you made me recall a few years ago when a front loader operator on the Southie waterfront was filmed dumping snow into the Harbor. That was a no-no. I hope nobody is doing that with this storm.
someone tell that to the Greene Construction company
Every snowfall, they've set up 2 giant snow-melters on Avenue Louis Pasteur, and brought in 18 wheelers of snow for hours on end. The water is going right into the sewers.
Nothing wrong with that.
That's where melted snow is going to go anyway. Putting it in storm drains isn't the same as dumping it straight into the ocean/river.
actually, it is almost exactly the same
Maybe there is some slight solids removal in the sumps of the catch basins. Other than that, it's a straight shot to the Charles, Harbor or other waterway.
Virtually all of the rest of
Virtually all of the rest of the sidewalks in dense urban neighborhoods around here weren't blocked like this. The problem isn't that snow can't be dumped in the river. It's sloppiness on the part of the plow driver.
I've seen some like this
In Allston they for part of the day a sidewalk was nearly blocked because someone had plowed snow off of the street and onto the sidewalk. There's also lots of huge snow piles some six feet or more high in places.
Dumping in the river would be on solution. I was reading about snow removal in Syracuse, who are masters of it (the year they broke their own record for snow removal the schoools only had two snow days and the airport only closed for fifteen minutes) they make a point of hauling snow away to parks and empty lots where it gets dumped.
Where to dump it
You dump snow in snow dumps. The closest one to me is in Allston at the CSX railyard. They're trucking the snow there from around Allston, Brighton, and Brookline as far as I've seen.
I have a gut feeling that the plan is to front-end load this snow onto one of those trucks in the next 12-24 hours. Putting it anywhere else wouldn't have made that as easy/possible.
In the meantime, there's a sidewalk on the other side of the street.