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Nevada snow removal crews explore street clearing strategies
You can talk about an idea and theorize about whether it will work or not and even try it out in a laboratory, but the only way to find out for sure is to actually try it in the real world.
That was the situation facing Nevada's snow removal crews when it started snowing Wednesday nght.
City Manager JD Kehrman said Friday afternoon that Roger Beach, who will head the new field operations department starting in February, and David Irwin, one of the city's crew leaders and the originator of the idea, had requested and received permission to experiment with applying a mixture of salt and calcium chloride to the Nevada Square before the snow accumulated to keep it from sticking to the pavement. Once the mixture was applied the snow removal crews would be able to work on other areas while the snow on the Square waited.
Once they had worked on other trouble spots, they would be able to go back to the Square and more easily remove the snow down to the pavement.
While people coming to the Square Thursday morning may not believe it, in concept, the experiment was a success, the timing just needs a little work.
"The key is to figure out how to do this before the people come to work," Kehrman said, adding that they had quite a few complaints about the Square still being snow-covered Thursday morning.
"The downtown business district is a priority," he said.
A second thing that was done was to pile the snow from the Square on the Loving property on West Cherry Street that the city recently purchased, instead of hauling it to the public works facility on Smelter Hill. That will not be an option in the future, but for now it is currently available and much closer to the Square, he said.
Kehrman said that doing these two things cut the needed manpower and equipment to one third of what had been needed in the past. He said that Beach and Irwin are currently in the process of analyzing the snow removal process and looking at the routes and the time involved, with the goal of making further improvements. And with snow in the forecast for Sunday, they may have a chance to put what they have learned into practice.