After the plowing, a filthy harvest grows

Piles from the street mount in snow dumps

BEVERLY - In the summertime, David M. Lynch Memorial Park is described around town as "the jewel of Beverly," with its rose garden and gracious lawn that rolls toward the glittering ocean.

So by winter, one might logically expect nothing more than a graceful field in which the bright blue Atlantic reflects off the blazing expanse of snow that leads to it. Not really. Come the first storm, a portion of the park is transformed into the town's snow dump, a repository for towering piles of dark, trash-speckled snow trucked in from the business district.

And there it sits, growing with each snowfall, receding in the occasional spates of warmth, not merely an eyesore to locals like Nancy Pantano, whose dining room overlooks the park, but a potential health hazard that lasts long after winter has passed.

"In the spring, everything's green, the grass is coming up, and it's still there," Pantano said of the snow piles. "It's disgusting."

The Beverly park is but one example of how cities and towns across the region struggle with the annual scourge of snow - 4 feet this season and still falling. Some communities, like Cambridge and Brockton, just let it melt on the side of streets; others spend thousands of dollars annually trucking it to local snow dumps, known in the parlance of some public works commissioners as "snow farms."

Like foul weather itself, rarely do the results make anyone happy.

First off, the dumps are ugly. The snow can form tall, brown towers that harden to ice. In the spring, they slowly melt, leaving a slippery drizzle of cigarette butts, salt, and oil and whatever else is scraped off municipal streets. The liquid usually drains into the ground or the nearest sewer. Some communities treat their location like a state secret. In Worcester, officials will say only that they haul unwanted snow to undisclosed locations in the city, citing concerns that private contractors will fill them with more snow. In Boston, which has spent $12.2 million of its $12.9 million snow removal budget so far this season, it took city officials more than a day to collect and release information on the city's six snow farms.

One is on Route 99 in Charlestown near the Schrafft's building, according to information released by the mayor's office. Another is in the parking lot of Reservation Road Park in Hyde Park. On Friday, the piles there were icy blobs about 5 feet tall and several parking spaces wide. They could be much smaller after Sunday, when temperatures are expected to soar to 50 degrees.

Dennis Royer, Boston's chief of public works and transportation, said an army of city workers usually clears schoolyards and the curbsides' mountains of snow at night. Using backhoes, they load it into trucks and haul it to the farms. Once frozen, the piles are hard enough to break a steel plow, he said.

Royer laughed when asked whether the city could simply leave the snow to melt.

"People expect every street to be done, for every alley to be available," he said. "That's the expectation here, and that's what we're set up to do."

And though the issue of what to do with dirty snow may seem lighter than a snowflake, there are real environmental implications. For decades, communities up and down the coastline dumped plowed snow into the ocean or rivers, until a host of federal, state, and local environmental rules associated with the cleanup of Boston Harbor ended the practice.

The US Environmental Protection Agency's website said snow dumping can contaminate groundwater supplies with road salt and hasten erosion along freshwater bodies because the dirty piles inhibit the growth of vegetation. Additives in road salt to prevent it from caking or corroding can also leach toxic metals into water, hurting aquatic life.

"The best practice for snow removal is to be able to place it at upland locations, something like a field or some piece of ground where essentially the snow can melt slowly and naturally . . . filtering through the earth," said David Deegan, a spokesman for the regional office of the EPA in Boston.

That may be bad news for anyone in Beverly who hates seeing dirty snow piles crowding parts of David M. Lynch Memorial Park.

Perhaps those officials can learn something from Dana Snow, the superintendent overseeing snow removal in nearby Marblehead, a town with no snow farms. There, the snow is usually left in banks along the road.

"We don't have any area where we can put it other than parks," Snow said, "and all the parks are slated for baseball" in the spring.

Megan Woolhouse can be reached at mwoolhouse@globe.com.