Weissberg & Co. Melt Mount Snow

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by Uma Ramiah | Feb 11, 2011 8:56 am

(5) Comments | Commenting has been closed | E-mail the Author

Posted to: Environment, Fair Haven

Facing a mountain of frozen, packed precipitation, the New Haven Department of Public Works called for backup, in the form of a 19,000-pound, snow-melting truck.

“This is a pilot effort,” said DPW Deputy Director Howard Weissberg as he watched the truck in action Thursday night in the department parking lot on Middletown Avenue. “We’ll see how it works and then go from there.”

Weissberg’s crew spent Thursday night into the wee hours of Friday morning experimenting with a new way to get rid of this winter’s unwelcome surprise guest—eviscerating it en masse, with an ice-melting truck.

New Haven, like much of the rest of New England, has been dealt record temperatures and snowfall, making transportation difficult in neighborhoods around the city. One solution: collecting snow from streets, and dumping it in the parking lot of the DPW, among other spots in town.

But what to do about the frozen mountain of snow?

Weissberg received a proposal from Tarantino Landscapes: they offered to melt the problem away. City traffic chief Jim Travers got wind of the proposal, said Weissberg, and pushed for it.

“Until now, we’d only done private and commercial snow melting,” said Gino Tarantino, President of Tarantino Landscape, the Bridgeport based company that supplied the ice melting truck. “This is our first season doing this, and this is the first city we’re serving.”

Uma Ramiah Photos The snow melting machine works at a rate of 60 tons per hour, turning snow into water. Snow is dumped into the back of the truck, melted with a 1000-gallon bath of hot water, and discharged into the sewer system. And apparently it emerges cleaner: it’s passed through a filter before being released. The truck works off of 800 gallons of diesel fuel.

“Right now, we’re the only company in Connecticut providing this service,” said Tarantino.

He said the quote for melting the mountain of snow for New Haven was just under $10,000.

The melting began at 7:30 Thursday night. In the meantime, city officials Travers and DPW chief John Prokop were being grilled at City Hall over New Haven’s response to snow.

Weissberg, hanging out with the snow melting crew, said the process would probably go on until about 5 a.m. He said he would stick around til about 1 a.m. “I think we’ll take it in shifts.”

Comments

posted by: anon on February 11, 2011 9:10am

Nice- turning snow into asthma-causing diesel pollution.

posted by: WOW!!! on February 11, 2011 9:18am

Pure Genius!!! I love it!!! Where can Shelton go to get one of these??? What a great idea!!!

posted by: pdh on February 11, 2011 9:35am

We discovered an efficient and cheap way of removing accumulations of snow and ice.

We had a snowpile that was roughly 5’x 6’ x 6’ that was obstructing access to our driveway.

We used a garden hose to infuse it with water. It took a couple of hours. The force of the water hollowed out the pile and turned it to slush. We then broke it up with shovels and pushed it down a nearby storm drain.

It would be interesting to see what could be done with a fire hose!

posted by: Cedarhillresident on February 11, 2011 10:23am

pdh
My darn hose is under snow! But if lowes has one I may just do that next week when we get the warming! Thanks for the idea!

posted by: robn on February 11, 2011 2:47pm

ANON,

In extreme cases when snow removal becomes necessary, it might be less polluting to melt it (filtering before letting it down storm drains) than it is to haul it away on dump trucks and dump it in a field (salinating and petro-polluting such field).

The Snow Dragon equipment does this and their fuel useage looks low.
http://www.snowdragonmelters.com/home.asp?ID=2

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