The City of Owen Sound’s snow plows are out in force clearing roads after the recent heavy snow fall.
Director of Public Works and Engineering Lara Widdifield says their staff have been working continuously over the last two days with their full complement of vehicles out on the roads.
“We have actually managed to, I just checked our GPS mapping that we have managed to pretty much cover most of the roads at least once in the last 24 hours. The roads that we maybe covered near the beginning that have sort of accumulated more snow since then, they will be getting around to those again probably within the next 24 hours,” says Widdifield.
She feels public works staff have doing doing well covering city roads, but the sidewalks will take a little longer to wrap up.
“There is quite a bit of snow and when the snow accumulation is more than six inches or so, we need to use the blowers on the sidewalk plows and that means they can only travel at about four kilometres an hour, so that takes a long time to cover 107 kilometres of sidewalk with four sidewalk plows,” says Widdifield.
She adds as public works staff prioritize the major roads in the city, they will try to tend to the lower volume roads as they drive by them.
Widdifield says after the last couple of warm winters, this winter is testing its resources as they are unable to budget for a season like this consistently.
“We still do meet all of our legislative requirements and we just ask that people have a little bit of patience with us as we go about trying to keep the roads safe,” says Widdifield.