City Roads Manager Luc Gagne says the decision by Ottawa’s four school boards to cancel classes today was the right call.
“I think everybody made an awesome call,” he told Newstalk 580 CFRA’s The Morning Rush with Bill Carroll. “That’ll give us an opportunity this morning to get around a few times, and get the roads reasonable and get things opened up a little bit.”
As of 6:00 a.m. Wednesday, 27 cm of snow was recorded at the Ottawa Airport since the system moved into the region Tuesday afternoon.
Gagne says he wishes these kinds of cancellations had been planned for the major snowstorm in February 2016, where 51 cm fell in a single day.
“I think those were lessons learned and it’s given us an opportunity to get around when there’s no cars on the road.”
Gagne says his crews were working days in advance of this storm, carting snow away just to make room for more.
“We’ve been doing snow removal non-stop since about January 20,” he said. “We did snow removal through Sunday night and Monday night, even Tuesday during the day just simply to make room for this event. It’s a huge, huge task.”
He says it could take weeks to remove the snowbanks from this latest storm, but he’s confident the roads will be cleared.
But Gagne admits residential side streets may present a greater challenge. Some of the snow from previous storms has melted and refrozen, making it much harder to clear.
“We’ll get graters in there, that’s about the only piece of machinery that can move that solid base,” he said. “We’ve been actually at that the entire time. I know a lot of folks think we’re not getting there fast enough. It’s a very, very slow process cutting ice. We were cutting ice right up until Tuesday afternoon with the onset of the snow.
“So we’ll get these roads plowed and cleared and get them widened out, and then we’ll get back to cutting that ice.”