Sept-Îles, Que., pays hefty price to deal with this year’s colossal snowfall
The city of Sept-Îles, Que., has officially run out of space to store the large quantities of snow that fell there this year and is now resorting to transporting the excess snow by truck to the dump.
The city experienced massive snow falls in February and early March, amassing more than three metres of snow in just one month.
The additional efforts needed to remove the extra snow come at an unexpected cost.
“When so much snow falls in such a short period of time, what happens is that we have to pay a lot of overtime and we have to use a lot of equipment that belongs to contractors,” explained the city’s general manager, Patrick Gwilliam.
The city is responsible for clearing a territory that extends over some 280 kilometres of municipal streets.
On Monday, city council voted to approve a $350,000 increase to its snow removal budget for this year.
That’s a lot of money for a city of less than 30,000 people just for snow removal, Gwilliam said.
“Mother Nature hasn’t been on our side this year, because most of our snow storms have been on Fridays or Saturdays or Sundays, where of course we have to pay our employees time-and-a-half.”
Snow removal companies feel the heat
“It’s been a big, big winter for snow-removal contractors,” said Marco Lévesque, who owns a local snow-removal company called Le Fils Transport Inc. in Sept-Îles.
Lévesque removes and transports snow for the city, and he also has some personal contracts.
He’s contractually obligated to go out and plow snow every time there is a dump of five centimetres or more. He said he’s already been out 16 more times than last year.
And while he normally works about 70 hours per week in the winter, this season he said he often had to work for 90, sometimes even 100 hours per week.
“If we compare to previous winters, it’s been a while since I have seen this,” he said. “Everyone is tired. Everyone is sick of it.”
Lévesque said he knows some contractors who are so discouraged by this season and by the increased price of diesel, that they have decided to quit the business.
Lévesque’s hope for milder, snow-free spring days won’t happen just yet, as the city is expecting yet another snowfall this Friday.
