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Montreal wages a $166-million battle against snow every single year to keep its streets & sidewalks clear. The city spends more than any other in the world on picking up snow and putting down salt on its 10,000 km of roads: in 2019–20, its snow removal budget hit $166.4 million.
The Francon depot receives about 40% of the city’s snow — equivalent to 2,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. The rest of the snow is split between 11 other depots and 15 sewer dumps, where snow is dumped into massive tunnels and sent to a water treatment facility.
The snow contractors typically start with sidewalks & busy thorough- fares, then move to smaller, residential streets as the hours stretch on. As many as 300 dump trucks an hour line up at the gate all day and night to unload their heaps of snow, then go back out to collect more.
But Jean-François Parenteau, mayor of Verdun and a Montreal city councillor who oversees snow removal for the city, says many don’t appreciate the scope of the endeavour. Plowing snow is a 1,000-person & 1,000-truck project; removing it takes another 3,000 people & 2,200 trucks.
So, where did the city’s impossibly high standards come from, and why is Montreal so dedicated to defeating winter? Throughout the 1800s and early 1900s, Montrealers would pitch in to manually shovel thoroughfares.
It was a Montreal-area milk deliverer, Arthur Sicard, who invented the first snow blower. Tired of scaling snowbanks, he created a machine with an auger-like apparatus & fan attached to the front of a truck that could mechanically cut up the piles & blow them into trucks.
Over time, private construction and landscaping companies acquired the machines — as well as the contracts — to do some of the city’s snow-clearing work. Today, half of Montreal’s snow operations are done by private groups, with contract’s from a few thousand to a few million $.
In non-COVID times, the city receives municipal pilgrims from around the world who come to learn how to efficiently coordinate such a massive endeavour.
The amount of money, resources and people Montreal plows into snow removal would make a more modest city shrink with embarrassment. To its citizens, however, it is never enough.
Read the full story from @TraceyLindeman, with photos from @christianfleury, in the latest issue of Canadian Geographic magazine, on newsstands now! https://www.canadiangeographic.ca/article/photos-defeating-winter
