THUNDER BAY – The City of Thunder Bay says its approach to snow clearing worked according to plan during a snowstorm on Monday, despite some vocal complaints from residents on social media.
The city acknowledged it did not have snow plows on the roads Monday evening, during and immediately after some of the heaviest periods of snowfall, and leading up to the cancellation of public transit service that night.
Acting roads manager Ian Spoljarich said that’s simply a result of finite staffing resources, which don’t allow the city to put crews on the road 24/7, and a system that focuses snow clearing efforts in the early morning.
A full complement of staff – around 60 people – was called in to clear roads and sidewalks during the day Monday, a statutory holiday for many, he said. However, those plows were off the roads by around 6 p.m. Monday, while snow was still falling and conditions were poor.
“By the time it accumulated enough to start plowing, we did have equipment out plowing the roads, but it was coming down so fast, as soon as we plowed it, it’d come right back down – and then we had to give the crews enough rest to come in for 2 a.m.,” Spoljarich said.
That accords with the city’s snow clearing policies, which target snowstorm cleanup for the 2 a.m. to 7 a.m. period. That’s when the work is most effective, thanks to light traffic and parking prohibitions on major streets, the city says.
In those conditions, the city’s policies state its road crews can clear priority routes in about five hours. Those include arterial roads, collector streets, bus routes, and streets connecting schools, and emergency services.
The city’s standards require it to plow priority roadways when five centimetres or more of snow accumulates in one event. The residential standard is 10 centimetres.
Crews clear priority routes in five to seven hours, while it can take up to 72 hours to finish residential plowing, according to the standard.
Monday’s snowstorm presented challenging conditions, Spoljarich said, with wind drifts and snowfall of up to 25 centimetres in the city.
It was significant enough to force Thunder Bay Transit to cancel service altogether by around 9 p.m. Monday, when most buses were scheduled to run until around 11 p.m.
It’s “pretty rare” for weather to cause a full transit shutdown, according to transit manager Brad Loroff, who said it hadn’t happened in either of the previous two winters.
City buses became stuck in the snow 20 times Monday, he said, with a third of its fleet at one point stuck on the sidelines.
“We reached a point by about 8 o’clock [Monday] where it just became unsustainable,” he said. “As quickly as some units would become freed, other units were getting stuck. At that point, it didn’t make sense to continue.”
Both Loroff and Spoljarich said the city would review the experience during the snowstorm, but neither indicated they saw anything amiss.
“We’ll look back at that event and see what we could have done better,” said Spoljarich, referring to complaints over the lack of plowing in the evening. “But there’s always going to be that gap, just because staff can’t work 24 hours a day.”
Loroff said transit would also review the cancellation of service Monday.
“Anytime… service is impacted, our team will do a review to see what could have been done better. Certainly if it comes up that there should be further discussions with [the roads department], we can do that.”
