Montreal tackles its eternal snow

Not a snowflake yet covers Montreal, but the city is already hard at work these days to tackle its eternal snow. With bulldozers and mechanical excavators.

Black, dirty and filled with rubbish, the gigantic bank of icy snow at the bottom of the Saint-Michel snow deposit has survived the summer. Several summers, in fact.

“I still have snow from 2008 in there,” assures Giovanni Scattone, site foreman, amid the noise of the construction site. He observes the operations of the unloading dock. In winter, up to 300 trucks an hour unload tons of snow at the bottom of the old Francon quarry.

The pit is huge. Nearly 100 soccer fields. But Mr. Scattone and his teams started each winter with a little more snow at the bottom of the hole and therefore more risk of problems – or even total blockage of the unloading dock – in the event of a particularly harsh winter.

“Last winter, it was a big challenge,” describes the foreman. More than 2.5 meters of snow fell, causing the mountain to rise to the height of the unloading dock. Specialized machinery must then be used to try to push the snow further. A complex task.

Always ready

The City has therefore decided, for two years, to use the strong method: a month of incessant attacks, each fall, by three drivers of heavy machinery, in order to bring down the “base” level of the snowdrift.

Because in the heart of winter, Montreal cannot afford to lose the site where it dumps up to 40% of its snow.

“Our role is to maintain fluidity. We must not stop the traffic” of snow trucks coming to unload their contents, explains Giovanni Scattone.

The workers are therefore chipping away at this urban glacier, trying above all to remove the layer of ice and gravel which forms “a sort of protective layer” on the snow, explains Philippe Sabourin, corporate spokesperson for the City of Montreal. “We work on the snow, we accelerate the melting. » Mr. Sabourin has no illusions: they will not get through it during their month of work. But every meter gained is crucial to providing space for offloads. At the time of the passage of The Pressits height was estimated at between 30 and 45 meters.

The work is extremely delicate, since the heavy machines climb directly onto the mass that the workers must destroy. They must work level and be very careful to prevent the ice from collapsing beneath them.

The meltwater, for its part, forms two large lakes (“very salty”, according to Giovanni Scattone) at the bottom of the quarry. A first rough filtering is carried out, then it is pumped tens of meters higher to the metropolis’s sewer network.

Unload waste

In addition to gravel, the dirty glacier of the Francon quarry also contains an impressive quantity of rubbish.

Most of it is waste left on the street and passed through a blower.

Others are not there inadvertently. Dozens – even hundreds – of tires are scattered at the foot of the mountain. “Last year, we had a little surprise,” Mr. Scattone explained. A trucker apparently hid a shipment of tires destined for the landfill under some snow to save landfill costs. And with hundreds of trucks per hour, it’s difficult to find the culprit, even with a camera surveillance system.

Millions for a new dock

The City of Montreal has just launched a call for tenders to build a new unloading dock around a hundred meters wide at the top of the Saint-Michel quarry. This platform will replace three individual platforms, “closed and considered unstable by the City”. A major problem when they are perched in the void, several tens of meters high. The work, which should allow more trucks to dump their snow in the quarry, must begin at the end of winter 2024, for commissioning before 2025. Two other individual docks are currently condemned by the City, according to the tender documents.