Charlie Breitrose A truck plows a Watertown street.
Watertown Public Works crews will be busy this week continuing efforts to dig the City out after the heavy snow on Sunday and Monday, said City Manager George Proakis.
“This storm was significant – over 19 inches of snow in Watertown since Sunday. The DPW crews have been working for over 50 hours, but they are not done yet,” Proakis said. “They are going to be addressing a number of challenging spots over the next few days, including many of those snowbanks at the street corners.”
On Tuesday night, and continuing through Thursday night, the DPW will send out six front-end loaders, 12 dump trucks, and other equipment to do more clean up and sanding of roadways. Those crews focused on cleaning up the street corners, bus stops, snow piles, etc., Proakis said.
On Monday and Tuesday, the focus had been on getting the Watertown Public Schools open following two snow days.
Many streets remain significantly narrower due to the snow piled up by plows. With the end of the Snow Emergency, cars can be parked on the roadway during the day, but those can make snow removal more challenging.
“That’s why it’s so important to have cars off the streets during the overnights in the winter,” Proakis said. “We will continue to enforce our overnight winter parking ban in the coming nights, as our crews continue to work.”
Proakis also encouraged residents to do their best to remove snow from sidewalks in front of their homes.
“We know that there are some areas where we had to plow snow back onto sidewalks as we widened streets (Monday) night,” Proakis said. “I can’t say that won’t happen again, as we continue to ensure fully passable streets. But we will work to remove the large obstructions to the extent that we can. And we are asking our property owners — to the best extent possible — to shovel the snow on the sidewalks in front of their buildings.”
Proakis told the City Council Tuesday that while the City has the ability to ticket for not clearing sidewalks with the Residential Snow & Ice Ordinance, but officials will use their judgement. Inspectors will go out to but, for instance, if a pile of snow on a sidewalk was put there by a DPW plow that won’t be ticketed.