It may feel like spring but the Sanitation Department is gearing up for another snow season. In a cavernous SoHo garage Thursday afternoon, workers transformed a ubiquitous white city garbage truck into snow’s worst nightmare, hitching chains to the tires and attaching a massive orange plow to the front.
“This truck becomes super truck,” said Sanitation Commissioner Edward Grayson. “It goes from picking up your refuse and recyclables, into being the greatest snow-fighting piece of equipment that we have. It’s out there all day every day, 12-hour shifts.”
On average it takes DSNY between 18 and 24 hours to suit up all 2,200 city garbage trucks as snow plows. That means, of course, garbage can’t be collected before, during, or after the storm.
“We’re trying to stay out there till the last possible minute that we can doing refuse and recyclables,” he said.
Plow preparations, as well as a fleet of salt spreaders and briners, are at the ready, all with the aim of avoiding a repeat of the great debacle of 2018, when six inches of snow caught an under-prepared city off guard, trapping New Yorkers on roadways for hours.
Supply chain issues have added an extra wrinkle to snow readiness this year, Grayson said. They’ve been stockpiling plow parts in anticipation of shortages. For cyclists, this year there will be 30 tractors that are small enough to plow bike lanes, twice the number working the streets last year. And it’s the second year DSNY will contend with outdoor dining structures, which can make navigating narrow city streets and parked cars an even more perilous dance.
“We have been practicing these routes, we know where the dining structures are,” Grayson said.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released their winter forecast Thursday, predicting above average temperatures for most of the country, including New York due to La Niña, for the second year in a row. However, Grayson said that doesn’t tell him much about expected snowfall. He’s seen high amounts of snow in warm years and low amounts of snow in cold years and vice versa. The city typically sees somewhere between 25 and 30 inches of snow a season no matter what the weather pattern.
Last season, for example, 38 inches of snow fell. The season before that just 4 inches did, according to tallies from the National Weather Service. More snow is predicted generally as another consequence of climate change.
“We’re expecting a few significant events peppered in with some minor events and we’re gonna do everything we can at the first flake of snow,” Grayson said. “We treat every event as if it could become a plowable event.”
