Moving Snow

As City residents finish the task of digging out from yesterday’s snow, I thought you might like to have some idea of what the storm cost.

Sixty City employees worked for 20 hours, staffing 52 plow trucks, spreading 3 million pounds of salt, to clear 1,800 lane miles of streets. The cost of the work? About $140 thousand, an estimate which includes the amount it would have cost to rent and fuel snow moving equipment at FEMA rates.

The Streets Department described yesterday’s storm as a “fairly easy and economical” one — compared to the last ice storm, which cost about $300 thousand. The big difference between the two storms, according to Todd Waeltermann, was the temperature.