This is what a City of Ottawa ‘snow dump’ looks like

City of Ottawa crews are continuing to clean up after back-to-back storms, but where does all that snow go?

Snow removed by the city ends up at one of seven ‘snow disposal facilities,’ including one at Clyde Avenue. It’s a final destination for snowbanks in the city, where dump trucks deliver snow.

“It’s just a constant stream of trucks coming in. We are operating 24 hours a day,” said Bryden Denyes with the City of Ottawa.

Denyes says at peak, there are 50 to 60 trucks coming in during 12 hours shifts, creating a hill around 185 feet tall.

The mountain of snow is so high, there is even a risk of an avalanches.

“We have to be aware of the risk of an avalanche. I know it sounds different, but it is a risk that we have to make sure we’re aware of,” Denyes said.

All the snow will take months to melt.

“We can see snow into August,” he said.

The facilities are purposely engineered to deal with snow that is picked up off the roadway.

“The reason we have these facilities is we need to store our snow somewhere when we do snow removal operations but, we also have to manage it properly,” Denyes said.

“There’s a lot of water runoff as this melts and there’s a lot of debris and garbage that does get picked up in the removal process. So, we want to make sure we’re getting that water out, getting it out of the system properly,”

According to the city, it has removed 628 linear curb kilometers of snow since the last pair of storms. That’s enough to drive to Toronto and halfway back.

“In relation to the last two events we had with almost 70 centimetres of snow, the last time we’ve had an event of that nature was March 2008,” Denyes said.

Some Ottawa city councillors are recognizing the hard work by crews, but many residents are questioning why some streets have their snow removed first.

“Especially over the past few days, there have been questions around how the city decides whether Street A or Street B is going to get removal,” said Coun. Jeff Leiper.

“We really just want to get that communication from the city about how those prioritization decisions are made.”

Denyes says there are three key areas that are looked at with snow removal operations – daytime, nighttime and Business Improvement areas. He says residential areas are done during the day typically, and arterial and main roadways are done at night because of traffic.

“Our supervisors and our teams know the areas they work in very well. So, they know historically where they need to work,” Denyes said. “If we’ve done removal already before the storms, we’re going to prioritize areas that we haven’t done”