Cleaning up snow: DPW gets to work

The Department of Public Works for the City of Worcester (DPW) finds snow removal to be a large problem. Over three hundred and seventy-five people are employed to plow the city, public and private. The snowstorm on the night of Saturday, January 20th took ten to twelve hours alone to clean up. "The main streets are our first concern and take a little less time to clean than the side streets," says Don Abraham of the DPW. When there is a great deal of snow, the downtown area including Main St., the Centrum, and City Hall have the snow trucked off. This takes about one night to do and improves the conditions for travel.

Many of the sidewalks may be in bad condition because the abutters, the people who own the adjoining property, haven't done their job in cleaning off the sidewalks. A Worcester ordinance states: "sidewalks must be cleared for safe pedestrian travel within 10 hours after snow ceases to fall." If this has not occurred, the DPW has set up a computer-based system to respond to complaints. The phone number is 929-1300. This is the fastest way to get a complaint resolved for any snow removal in the City of Worcester.

The people in the Department of Plant Services also their work cut out for them, as they often have to stay overnight to keep the parking lots clean and salted to make travel safe for pedestrians, emergency vehicles, and WPI residents. According to Ron Klocek, the head of WPI's ground crew, over the last stormy weekend, seven men stayed until 11pm on Friday night in order to keep the roads safe. They had to come in on Saturday to fix some icy spots, and on Sunday they arrived at 6am and worked until 5pm cleaning and salting the WPI campus and surrounding WPI properties.

They have to plow all of the parking lots and six miles of sidewalks. To do this they use three John Deere tractors with snow blowers, a small John Deere tractor to plow the sidewalks, two dump trucks, a state body truck, and two pickups, a three-fourths ton and one ton. They no longer use sand, however in a normal snowstorm they can use four tons of rock salt and a half-ton of magnesium chloride. This can fluctuate depending on the severity of the storm.