The city had to pull back temporarily on Tuesday from part of a special operation to clear the narrowest, snow-clogged streets, and adjusted the list of targets to hit Wednesday.
The changes occurred because of — what else? — a new batch of snow.
Mayor Toni Harp has issued a week-long citywide ban on odd-side street parking. That makes way for plows to clear a wider path on roads where mounds of ice and snow accumulated during a series of snow storms thanks to a failure to enforce an earlier ban. The plan is to ticket and tow cars illegally parked on odd sides of streets on the days when trash is taking place there this week. (Read about that here; because of the Presidents Day holiday, regular onday trash pick-up took place on Tuesday, on through Saturday.) Despite a new snowfall Tuesday, that plan continued apace, according to the two Dougs at the helm, public works chief Doug Arndt and traffic tsar Doug Hausladen. They said the city towed cars following behind trash pick-ups Tuesday so plows could get closer to curbs. They were able to do that in addition to a regular citywide plowing of the new 2 – 4 inches falling during the day.
But they didn’t have the trucks and person-power to keep on schedule for a second catch-up snow removal (rather than just plowing) operation this week: Operation Snow Begone (our name, not theirs), on 39 or so especially narrow streets rendered unpassable for emergency and public-works vehicles. In that operation, the city is dispatching payloaders to cart the mounds away. (Read about that here.)
The city originally planned to hit eight of those streets Tuesday in the Hill and Newhallville. But it had to divert trucks. I tended up posting towing notices for the three of the eight. It was able to free up one payloader during the snowfall to push the ice and snow into big piles at the ends of three of those streets, Newhallville’s Ivy and Lilac streets and Sheffield Avenue, according to Arndt. He expected haulers to arrive to cart away those mounds by the end of the day.
So the new schedule for Wednesday’s special removal operation calls for towing cars and carting away snow-ice mountains on Cassius Street, Edgar Street, King Place, Button Street, and Wilson Street in the Hill; and Batter Terrace, Norton Street, and Hotchkiss Street in West River.
