I have to say that I saw on McKinley, pay loader G966 (or 966G) remove an 8 ft pile dumped Sun in a driveway. Cheers to that driver! Some drivers are not from our city, haven't idea what is where. Check out pix in daylight of unplowed streets--now think of plowing those in the dark in whiteout conditions! One could never distinguish bet. A car and another pile, nor where the street actually is. I saw a pay loader spend 25 minutes to do one wide block, no parked cars, lots of room to dump on lawns. It takes time.

I mean that it is far harder under tougher conditions. Kudos still to that operator who with consideration and care removed the huge pile from previous day. Let it happen to all.

Snow has been dropped ON property all over Wesyville. Trust me, I walk. I think they have to do it that way. I presume they at times can,t see driveways or have no choice as the load is too much.

With the historic amount of snow we have had in a 24 hour period, digging out as a community has taken much longer than we would have liked. DPW continues snow removal and road widening operations, LCI has been delivering snow shoveling warnings, and 203-946-8221 is still the number to call for assistance with storm related questions and information. The city’s website provides current information: www.cityofnewhaven.com..

Our snow emergency work has been completed. If your snow issue hasn't been addressed, please reopen or resubmit with more information to SeeClickFix. Thanks for your patience.

Snow on driveway at 168 West Rock has NOT be cleared.

Could Mr.Smuts make a visit to this driveway and see how the "finished with the plowing" plays out away from Church Street.
This has been a full week of notice....

Our snow emergency work has been completed. If your snow issue has not been addressed please reopen or resubmit with more information to SeeClickFix. Wr continue to do snow clean up. Thanks for your patience.

Whoops! Sorry Marisa. Didn't see reopen. We will check it out..

We are closing snow issues. Our crew has been reassigned to other maintenance issues such as potholes and bulk trash. Thanks.

Really! The "Whoops! Sorry..." seems to have been enough for PW, but I never saw them check out my neighbor's driveway, nor did they clear it out. The snow may be nearly melted now (still a small pile left on his driveway), but back on Feb. 19 there was still plenty.

@Marisa and West Rock neighbors:

I'm the City's Chief Administrative Officer and I wanted to say that we are sorry for your experience during the big storm in February. A couple days into the clean-up and after emergency priorities (opening the streets for emergency vehicles, etc), we did try to address the instances where we dumped large piles of snow in people's driveways. We obviously missed this address. Residents should be able to expect that the City would address a 7 foot snow pile they created in a driveway, and your frustration is entirely understandable particularly after letting us know about it more than once.

The snow is largely melted now, but to address the issue going forward, we always do an "After Action Report" that focuses on what we can do to improve our efforts.

To summarize what we faced, in a normal storm with 10 to 20 inches of snow, we divide the City into 22 main snow routes with a big plow truck responsible for about 12 miles of road. This storm was 34 inches - the most since 1888 - and our plow trucks are physically incapable of plowing that much snow. The only way to clear roads is with a payloader - big heavy machinery with 4-5 foot tires. The City only owns 4 payloaders because we only get this much snow every century, so we had to hire outside contractors. We ended up hiring about 25 additional payloaders and spent over $2.5 million on storm operations (we'll get about $750,000 back from the federal government, possibily a little more).

Just as we had to scale up and change the equipment we had during this storm, we had to do the same for supervision and accountability systems. The normal plow routes do not need a large number of supervisors because our crews know exactly what to do. With the payloaders - staffed by non-city worker contractors - we added to our Public Works supervisors with Parks and Fire Department supervisors following our protocol for extreme events, but still had a tremendous challenge with span of control. There is very little in the way of a set plan in an extreme event like a 34 inch storm, so our crews and supervisors were constantly reacting on the fly to unique needs and circumstances. In that context, we had a hard time tracking non-emergency priorities like a driveway mound. We managed to get to most of them, but we did miss some.

With so many non-city employees on the crews and supervisors in different roles, our normal systems of tracking issues did not work. We put in extraordinary effort to make sure all emergency issues were tracked to completion, but we will be working to improve our ability to track all issues to ensure they get done.

- Rob Smuts