Plowing Soft Snow

Winter temperatures can fluctuate more than 30 degrees, sometimes within days.

Warmer temperatures cause packed snow on the roads to melt and become soft and slushy. Vehicles driving through this soft snow create irregularities on the road's surface. These irregularities require additional plowing/sanding/salting to keep the roads safer for vehicles.

Plowing the soft, slushy snow must be completed before the colder temperatures set in and freeze it. Once the snowpack re-freezes, correcting these issues with a snowplow is limited, and graders with ice blades are required to scrape the iced formations down to a smoother surface.

Rutting

When temperatures cause the packed snow on a street to melt and become soft and when vehicles drive through this snow, the surface becomes irregular. When this soft snow with all the irregularities freezes again, this is called rutting.

Road Scraping

Road scraping is needed when the rutting becomes too much for a vehicle to drive over. This task is completed with a grader equipped with an ice blade. This is a slow task involving multiple passes with the grader. With each pass, the grader removes a small layer of ice. This method removes the ice as small shards to the edge of the road and minimizes the creation of large ice chunks that require the City to pick up with a loader. When the grader does remove a large chunk of ice, a loader will be called in to remove it.