Dealing with snow in this cramped city has always been a challenge. It gets shoveled, plowed, trucked, and trampled. But the citizens of Boston have always had to rely on Mother Nature to do the one thing that will get rid of it for good: melt it.
During fierce winter storms, cities like New York and Toronto and some local agencies like the Massachusetts Port Authority use snow-melting machines capable of reducing tons of snow to water in a matter of minutes.
But Boston doesn't own snow melters. After a blizzard, the city typically loads snow from main streets, schools, and business districts into dump trucks and hauls it to one of the city's seven snow farms, empty parking lots where snow is pushed into towering piles and left to melt. In many residential areas, snow is simply pushed into banks that can block access to sidewalks and take up precious parking spaces.
Advocates say the melters get rid of snow more quickly and with less expense than trucking it to snow farms. And some residents say they could help the city get rid of the glacier-like piles that now accumulate on city streets.
"It's tough enough to park and get around Boston," said Blythe Berents, 41, who is urging her city councilor to push for snow melters.
"If the technology exists, why not use it?" she said.
Mayor Thomas M. Menino has remained uninterested.
"The way we do it now seems to work," said his spokeswoman, Dorothy Joyce. "We rarely see the type of snow that would warrant snow melting."
Not everyone at City Hall agrees. Councilor Michael Flaherty has been trying for years to get the city to invest in snow melters, which use steam to melt snow and deposit the water in sewers. In 2004, he proposed that the city adopt a pilot program and test the machines for a season or two.
"We handle snow too much," Flaherty said. "We push it and plow it, push it and plow it."
New York uses its 20 melters when more than 6 inches of snow falls, said John Doherty, the city's sanitation commissioner. The machines, which cost about $200,000, are hooked up to sewer lines, melting as much as 60 tons of snow an hour and filtering out trash in the process.
Fans of the machines say that the method is more cost effective because trucks don't have to drive snow across town, saving gas and time.
"If we're going to clean out midtown, I can take a melter there and then have the trucks go to it," Doherty said. "If I didn't, they'd have to drive across town."
And while the machines use diesel power to melt the snow, New York has to handle it only once. In Boston, the city has to pay for backhoes to load the snow into trucks, for plows to push it into piles once it is dumped, and for city workers to clean up the trash left after it melts.
In an e-mail last week, Public Works chief Dennis Royer said that the city has contracts with three companies that use snow melters in the event of a snow emergency.
"Most communities don't purchase them because the maintenance is very costly and the machine would sit in the yard for nine months of the year," Royer stated in the e-mail.
So far this season, Boston has spent $8 million of its $12 million snow and ice control budget on plowing, salting, and removing snow. The city has trucked snow to its vacant parking lots twice this year.
The Massachusetts Port Authority has 12 portable melters that it uses to clear gate and tarmac areas at Logan International Airport when there is more than an inch of snow on the ground. Trucking the snow to a snow farm would be "expensive and slow," said Massport spokesman Matthew Brelis.
"It's a combination of cost effectiveness and speed," Brelis said. "We want the airport to be operating at its full capabilities as soon as possible."
