According to the National Weather Service in Grand Forks, Crookston has 20.4 inches of snowfall since the first of the year with several larger systems like the one that came through Sunday into Monday. City of Crookston Public Works Director Pat Kelly says snow is piling up in Crookston with all the snowfall. “January has been a busy month,” said Kelly. “It’s starting to look like the years in the mid-late 90s around town with another blizzard or storm every week. The snow is piling up a lot.”
The City moved a good part of the early snowfall into Central Park for the snowmobile races and is now moving snow into the former Ottertail Power site on Crescent Avenue. “We were asked this winter to move snow into Central Park for the snowmobile snow-cross for the kids,” said Kelly. “Generally, our snow deposit site is the old Ottertail Power site on Crescent Avenue. We’ve hauled a fair amount of snow over there now that Central Park has about as much snow as it can take. When we have a chance, we push it up higher into big piles so we can get more into that site.”
At a recent City Council meeting Kelly was asked about using the snow gate on the motor graders to keep snow from piling up in driveways, which Kelly explains is ineffective for the larger snowfall totals Crookston has been seeing. “We have one snow gate and they are made for motor graders,” said Kelly. “We have two motor graders and we bought one gate last year. Although it is on the unit, we’re not operating it right now. They are good for a 3 to 4-inch snowfall and then they are ineffective with the snow going right over them like they’re not even there. When you’re using that you’re not allowed to use the wing on your motor grader, so you cut your capacity in half, so it takes twice as long to plow. With these snowfalls, it just goes right over it so we have not been using it on this snowfall anyway.”
Kelly says the City budgets a significant amount of money for snow removal and that the budget should stay strong as long as the City can avoid overtime. “Well it has been busy, and we do budget a fair amount of money for snow removal annually,” said Kelly. “What happens is if we can minimize our overtime, that’s what gets you, then with regular time if we spend more time on snow removal it’s probably less time tree trimming or something like that this time of year. We always try to be mindful of the budget and generally, we can open up all the streets in alleys in less than eight hours. This storm probably not, it’s been blowing back in on us especially on the outer reaches, so we’ll probably go out again tomorrow and clean up the routes before going downtown to haul snow away.”
Kelly also said the snow removal schedule is dependent on the forecast of each storm. “This particular event it didn’t appear on forecasts until mid-morning which was pretty much right on,” said Kelly. “So we went out at 8 o’clock on this. Generally, we try to get through downtown earlier with the motor graders to get away from traffic and people parking in the streets but we didn’t get a chance to do that [Monday]. That’s another reason why we’re going to try to go clean up downtown and the rest of our routes [Tuesday]. It’s really weather dependent, if we can go out a four in the morning that’s a pretty good time for us, it just really depends when the snow starts and stops and the wind factor too.”
Sand gets added to the streets during a snowfall beginning about three hours after the snowplows go out, to allow the plows to work ahead. Sand is also added between snowfalls if staff recognizes things are starting to ice up and the Crookston Police Department also calls into Public Works over the weekend if they notice things are getting slippery. Heavy snowfall usually brings ruts into the streets as well, which the City needs warmer weather to really eliminate explains Kelly. “On some of the busier streets, Central and Summit, that we plow with trucks which don’t do as well as motor graders we will sometimes get the ruts piling up,” said Kelly. “When its sub-zero that stuff turns to ice and cutting it is almost impossible. When it does warm up and soften up, we’ll try to get both our motor graders out in tandem to get those wagon wheel ruts out of there.”
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