Neelima Cherukuri dressed in her best cheetah print shorts and sandals before she picked up her shovel and braved the cold outside her Carson Street apartment.
“I’m not really cold right now,” she said. “I’m very lazy to put on shoes. I came out at — oh no, it’s been 40 minutes.”
The 17 inches of snow dropped by Monday’s blizzard reaffirmed what many Dorchester residents were already thinking: When will this winter end?
More than 44 inches of snow has dropped on Boston in the last month. With temperatures only recently hovering above freezing, much of it remains.
Meanwhile, Boston’s 14 “snow farms” continue to grow.
Three of these farms are in Dorchester. The lot at Bayside Expo, Circuit Drive and Franklin Park serve as designated areas where large trucks dump snow to be melted.
The city rented snow melters from two or three vendors, interim Chief of Streets Nick Gove said. The vendors fire up the machines for up to 10 hours and all melted snow is released into stormwater drains.
Snow farms are typically parcels that are in an “interim state” that don’t see a lot of traffic, like the lot of the former Boston Edison Power Plant in South Boston, Gove said. Others are placed in sites owned by the City, like the Bunker Hill lots in Charlestown. The large trucks that transport snow cause temporary road closures, and farm sites are chosen to minimize that disruption.
Gove said city crews start with pre-treating roads to create a “brine” of salt. Plows are deployed during the storm, targeting main roadways frequented by emergency vehicles and MBTA buses. Crews then load the snow into large trucks to be dumped at the snow farms, where it will be put into snow melters. The days following a storm consist of city crews clearing school lots, sidewalks, bike lanes and bus stops.
“We appreciate everybody’s cooperation with the snow emergency and related parking bans,” Gove said. “We know that that’s an inconvenience, but it’s really critical for us to be able to get back to the curb.”
In a post to BlueSky Social on Wednesday, Mayor Michelle Wu said that Tuesday (Feb.24) “was the [first] time the City has done large-scale daytime snow removal, holding the parking ban to give crews max space to work. Across daytime and overnight, we hauled away almost 1,500 truckloads of snow (25,000+ cubic yds) to clear main roads and school zones. [Thank you] to our hardworking City teams.”
The discussion of purchasing snow melters will be on the agenda at a 2 p.m. hearing on Tuesday, March 3, with city councilors Ed Flynn, Brian Worrell and Enrique Pepén. The trio will discuss establishing a snow corps and other snow removal strategies to bolster up Boston’s snow removal efforts.
Some Dorchester residents said they actually enjoyed their snow days, even if it meant shoveling. They appeared more bothered with Mother Nature herself.
“Maybe other people like the snow,” Cherukuri said, “but I’m done for this season.”
Others tolerated shoveling with more acceptance.
“I actually find it kind of gratifying,” fellow Dorchester resident Matthew Pugnaire-Jones said. “It’s not great, but it’s a sense of work.”
The East Cottage Street resident said he abbreviated his trip to Portland, Maine, to get back before the storm, but enjoyed being “holed up” at the Banshee pub Monday.
On Moseley Street, resident Doug Sorensen cleared snow from around his car to return to in-person work for the Army Corps of Engineers on Wednesday.
Sorensen said the large snowbanks around street parking areas have been crowded, but that the roads appeared well-treated prior to this storm. He said he’s done with winter weather.
“We can stop at this,” Sorensen said. “That would be nice.”