Scrubbing away winter

City street sweepers are getting an early start on spring cleaning

Pat O'Sullivan (foreground) drove his sweeper along West Newton Street yesterday as a worker pushed debris away from the curb. (George Rizer/Globe Staff)

The final statistics from the winter that mercifully ended yesterday are as grim as a 401(k) statement.

Fifty-one inches of snow buried streets and sidewalks. For 24 days, the temperature never crawled above freezing. Clouds obscured the sun 65 days during the winter. The city scattered 135,000 tons of salt and sand.

The thaw reduced all that misery to a thick, black grit that clogged gutters and catch basins along with cigarettes butts, plastic bottles, and hubcaps left behind by winter.

Yesterday, spring officially swept in. Perhaps not in the 36-degree wind or the barren Public Garden, where the sprouts of crocuses and tulips had barely cracked through the muddy earth. But on the streets of the South End, a dusty rumbling brought one of the most faithful harbingers of warm weather: an orange street sweeper.

"It's been a tough winter," said Mayor Thomas M. Menino, mentioning the grime and the stock market slide in the same thought. "Spring is [here]. Summer is coming. Better days are ahead."

Clean streets, Menino said, are "part of the psyche of the city."

The city launched its residential street sweeping campaign 10 days ahead of the typical April 1 start date to get a jump on removing the debris, which has already totaled 255 tons this month. The cleaning will be done according to the neighborhood's regular sweeping schedule, which is posted on street signs.

The Boston Transportation Department will ask residents to voluntarily move cars for the early street sweeping program, but parking violations will not be issued. Ticketing and towing will begin April 1.

To highlight the need, public works chief Dennis Royer stood in a gutter on West Newton Street and kicked at the grime with the bottom of his black, tasseled loafer.

"Look," Royer said. "I'm sitting here using my foot, and I'm not getting down to the pavement."

Shortly afterward, Jim O'Sullivan clattered by at the controls of an orange Elgin Pelican, a three-wheeled street sweeper that weaves around parked cars with the grace of slalom skier.

O'Sullivan sat in a perch 6 feet above the street and maneuvered with a "suicide knob," a fixed handle on the wheel that facilitates one-handed steering.

"If you had to put both hands on the wheel, you tend to overseer," said O'Sullivan, who has run the city's street-sweeping program for 17 years.

Left hand on the knob, he leaned to his right into a bubble window, which hangs out 6 inches over the edge sweeper for a bird's-eye view of the curb.

The sweeper glided down the street as if it were sliding on ice, blasting the asphalt with water that sent dust up into the cab and dried the throat.

Two spinning steel gutter brooms gobbled up the guck on the street, sending trash to a central broom under the cab.

The brooms fed the refuse onto a conveyor belt, which tossed it into a hopper like a garbage truck. One trip around the block grabbed roughly 3 tons of trash.

"Once in a while you have to get out of the machine and remove hubcaps and bricks and rocks," O'Sullivan said, "but it will eat pretty much everything else."

In the sweeper's path, squiggly lines of water trailed along the clear black asphalt.

The early spring cleaning may not restore the nearly 2,000 points the Dow Jones industrial average dropped this winter, or save any the 16,400 jobs Massachusetts has lost since December, but it could be a start.

The weather, at least, is expected to improve.

"The first weekend of spring will be glorious," said Alan Dunham, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Taunton. "Beautiful. Sunny."