Where Does the Snow Get Dumped?

Watching snow getting loaded into dump trucks today and hauled away.

Curious where does it all go?

Anyone got a complete map of the different dump sites for it based on where it's collected in Toronto?

I'm guessing the downtown snow maybe goes to The Spit, but it's closed at night so not sure where the night trucks go.

I think I saw a huge pile once near the Bayview/Bloor offramp of the DVP.

Drum?

http://www1.toronto.ca/wps/portal/c...nnel=cd3d4074781e1410VgnVCM10000071d60f89RCRD

Here's a list of every snow melter site and disposal site in the city.

I remember a number of years ago there was a huge mountain of snow at Downsview Park that was still there in June.

Downsview park is the site of the Transit Rd Storage/Melting site

Why does snow need to get melted at any of these sites? This isn't Manhattan or Tokyo. Surely there's enough room at any of these sites to hold mountains of snow.

Melting only occurs at the Transit Road site when the facility fills up and you'd be surprised just how much snow is brought there. Budapest Park and Ellesmere Yard seem to be the only spots where melting is performed right away.

Mississauga expiremented with a snow melter quite some time ago. Snow being removed from Lakeshore and the side streets around Port Credit was being dumped in the Port Credit library's parking lot and melted on site. It was found to be cheaper to simply truck it to the Clarkson Works Yard for storage where a giant snow blower forms the dumped snow into a giant pile.

I would have thought Toronto would have improved its' ways of managing snow disposal sites with the upcoming new winter maintenance contracts, but nope. The city requires the contractors responsible for the Keelesdale, New Toronto and Unwin dumps to have an excavator, bull dozer and front end loader on site to manage the snow pile.
Other municipalities simply use a single front-end loader with a snow blower attachment to form a large pile, the ammount of snow received is not an issue for the snow blowers made for snow dumps, so I don't know why Toronto would continue its' inefficient ways.

For a look back at the snowstorm of 1999, click on this link.

Okay so last night I saw one of the City's snowplows plow the street in front of my house no less than four times in the the span of an hour. Hardly any snow fell during this time, so it was mostly just pushing around old slush. Meanwhile, there are residential streets elsewhere in the city that still haven't been plowed after last weeks storm. Is this acceptable?

howl said:

I remember a number of years ago there was a huge mountain of snow at Downsview Park that was still there in June.

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Reminds me of last year, how Winnipeg had one that was stubbornly persisting through August. I never did hear about how long that one finally lasted.

TheTigerMaster said:

Okay so last night I saw one of the City's snowplows plow the street in front of my house no less than four times in the the span of an hour. Hardly any snow fell during this time, so it was mostly just pushing around old slush. Meanwhile, there are residential streets elsewhere in the city that still haven't been plowed after last weeks storm. Is this acceptable?

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Are you in an area with lots of one-way streets?

If so, there is a good chance they were actually working on other one-way streets and yours was a convenient way of getting back to them. Intersections are a pain in those areas as after clearing the right-hand turn curb they might have to double back a long way to get the left-hand turn curb of the same intersection.


It's also possible the driver was lost but it's much more likely they were working on intersections.

TheTigerMaster said:

Okay so last night I saw one of the City's snowplows plow the street in front of my house no less than four times in the the span of an hour. Hardly any snow fell during this time, so it was mostly just pushing around old slush. Meanwhile, there are residential streets elsewhere in the city that still haven't been plowed after last weeks storm. Is this acceptable?

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Sounds pretty acceptable if you want YOUR street plowed! (Seriously though, I live on a street that is a common short-cut and the plows seem to use it as a 'highway' and, I am glad to say, they keep their plow blades down when using it so our street IS quite well plowed.)

TheTigerMaster said:

Okay so last night I saw one of the City's snowplows plow the street in front of my house no less than four times in the the span of an hour. Hardly any snow fell during this time, so it was mostly just pushing around old slush. Meanwhile, there are residential streets elsewhere in the city that still haven't been plowed after last weeks storm. Is this acceptable?

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The people on those residential streets should have called 311 by now. If no response, then their ward councillor. If no response, then the mayor.

Depends on the road, if you live in a "Green road" (see map http://www1.toronto.ca/City Of Toro...les/pdf/2012/City_Wide Maps/city-wide_map.pdf), they won't plough it at all until 8cm has fallen.

See snow ploughing, from City of Toronto site.

wopchop said:

Depends on the road, if you live in a "Green road" (see map http://www1.toronto.ca/City Of Toro...les/pdf/2012/City_Wide Maps/city-wide_map.pdf), they won't plough it at all until 8cm has fallen.

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??? The green are laneways. They never plow any of the ones shown green around me. Not even with the worst of storms. They put salt down, that's it.