Expect snow removal to take another week, Montreal says
Mayor Valérie Plante said her own street had not yet been cleared
The operation to clear snow that has sat on roads and sidewalks since Feb. 16 will take another seven days, Mayor Valérie Plante said on Monday.
Plante said at a morning news conference that the city has now removed snow from 56 per cent of its streets, but she acknowledged that some people want the city to move faster.
"I understand very well the frustration of citizens," Plante said, noting that her own street has not yet been cleared, "but I want them to understand that everyone is working extremely hard."
Plante said city workers have been working tirelessly — aside from their legally mandated breaks required to operate heavy machinery — since the two storms hit Montreal earlier this month.
She described the snow-removal operation as a "marathon."
"If there's a situation like this — whether it's a flood, or a heat wave, a historic snow storm — often, the media is more in a sprint mode and us, the elected officials, the city workers, we're in a marathon mode," she said.
She said the city was also trying to ensure that emergency vehicles could travel down roads that had not yet been fully cleared. She said firefighters had gone out this weekend to check streets in their sectors. They found 900 streets that were impassible to their large trucks either because of snow or poorly parked cars, Plante said.
Since then, obstacles on 70 per cent of those streets had been cleared, Plante said.
Philippe Sabourin, the city's spokesperson, said garbage pickup was going to go ahead as planned this week, but he urged residents to lend a hand by bringing their trash to cleared sides of the streets, if possible.
Written by Matthew Lapierre