Calvin Couturier isn’t looking forward to spring. The Town of Slave Lake’s Superintendent of Operations looks at the huge piles of snow in ditches around town and knows there’s going to be hell to pay.
“They clean their whole parking lot and put it in the ditch,” he says, speaking of several commercial or industrial properties around town. Come spring those compacted piles of snow will block drainage and flood out properties upstream. It’s happened before he says.
“Then we’ve got to clean it out. This year’s going to be a nightmare.”
Couturier took The Leader on a tour last Thursday to look at some of the worst cases. There’s no question there’s a lot of snow, and some property owners are running out of places to put it. Others, however, have big yards and the machinery to move snow fairly easily. Yet they insist on piling it where they shouldn’t – on town property (boulevards and ditches) or in some cases on their neighbours’ property. Both are forbidden by municipal by-law.
Some plead ignorance of the rules, but Couturier says he isn’t buying that anymore. He’s been talking to people about it for years, it’s advertised every year and every property owner gets the lowdown in a notice with their water bill.
It’s not all bad news, of course.
“A lot of companies are starting to come around,” he says, pointing out the Atco yard at Birch Rd. and Main St. as a good example. Atco used to pile the snow up along the front of their property, or at the corner, but stopped doing it when asked.
Others in the neighbourhood have been less compliant. Couturier points out huge stacks of snow out at the front edge of properties, both blocking the ditch and obscuring visibility for anyone entering the street.
How the town plows snow, he explains, is to make a pile on one side of approaches, but not the other. This allows good visibility into the near lane of traffic. Where you see piles of snow on both sides of an approach road, you know it’s the property owner stacking it up.
“What really boils my butt,” Couturier says, is that property owners (especially residential ones) will pile the snow up like that, “and then complain to us about safety. So we’ve got to spend taxpayers’ money cleaning up other peoples’ messes!”
Getting back to the drainage issue. Couturier says the ideal spring would be about two months of temperatures of one or two degrees above freezing. If it melts fast, he predicts, “We’re going to flood.”
People seem to have the impression that the town has a huge crew of operators, Couturier says. Not so.
“We only have four guys. My overtime for the guys is just staggering.”
Couturier says he’s already approaching the limit of his 2008 snow-clearing budget, with at least a month of this winter left and another couple of months at the other end of the year still to come.
It would be good for that budget if people wouldn’t add to the headaches by filling drainage ditches with huge mountains of snow.
The bottom line: keep snow on your own property, or else haul it away. Don’t pile it on town property.

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