Descripción
The payloader that came by on Sunday dumped about 7 feet of snow on the sidewalk and driveway section of the PROPERTY (not the road part of the driveway.) This is not something we can shovel or snow blow our way out of.
Let's hope that when the snow removal phase starts, this snow will be removed.
13 Comentars
guest (Invitado)
WvilleMomGuest (Invitado)
WvilleMomGuest (Invitado)
WvilleMomGuest (Invitado)
Reconocido City of New Haven (Oficial verificado)
Cerrado Department of Public Works (Oficial verificado)
Reopened marisa (Usuario registrado)
trish (Invitado)
This has been a full week of notice....
Cerrado Department of Public Works (Oficial verificado)
Reopened Department of Public Works (Oficial verificado)
Cerrado Department of Public Works (Oficial verificado)
Reopened marisa (Usuario registrado)
Cerrado Rob Smuts (Usuario registrado)
@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