Snow's final resting place yet unknown
As they do with trash set out on sidewalks in the summer, most cities and towns take it as a solemn civic duty to remove the snow.
Where they put it after that is up to them.
Some local officials, overwhelmed yesterday by the inundation of white, wintry flakes, have no sure answer. "We just plow it," said Barbara Smith, who was frantically answering phone calls from residents yesterday at the Cambridge Public Works Department. "There's no place to put it."
Along the state's major highways, the question poses less of a conundrum. Snowplows lumbering along Interstate 95, for example, have room to force the snow off to the side -- or the median -- without causing problems for pedestrians on sidewalks or homeowners with narrow front walkways.
"We just push it off to the side," said Jon Carlisle, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Highway Department, which was busy yesterday clearing its 9,505 lane miles of roadway and 2,900 bridges across the state. "We don't have to plow into dumps."
Congested cities and towns are not so lucky.
In most urban communities, many built in the days of horse and buggy, no obvious place exists to dump all the snow without causing more of a headache for a shopkeeper who just shoveled her entryway or a resident who just exhumed his car from a snowy tomb.
In one exception, however, Arlington has its own snow dump on Summer Street, no more than an acre patch of asphalt.
Teresa DeBenedictis, Arlington's assistant director of public works, said the town will probably begin trucking snow to the site tomorrow after school grounds are cleared.
"After we finish this phase, we'll open it up," DeBenedictis said, confident that the town's snow dump can accommodate the accumulation. "We have no chance of filling it up there."
Yesterday, Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino was trying to decide what, if anything, could be done with all the city's snow. He planned to pose the question to public works officials at a meeting this morning.
"Until a few years ago, we were able to dump it into the harbor," Menino told reporters at City Hall. "That's not the environmentally right thing to do. We will not do that, so we have to find a vacant piece of land within the city of Boston where we're able to put that snow."
Under consideration, the mayor said, are four possible "snow farms," -- vacant and as yet undisclosed locations around the city -- where crews can unload the snow without tainting water supplies or stirring a neighborhood controversy.
The top priority, the mayor said, is to make sure schools and bus stops are clear for students. Officials will then consider how much snow they can afford to truck from other places in Boston, Menino said.
"We haven't decided how much snow we're going to move from the streets in our city," Menino said. "It's a costly removal process because we do them at night. It's all overtime."
Governor Mitt Romney, an avid skier accustomed to the finest powder in Utah, made his own suggestion yesterday: to haul the snow to Wachusett Mountain Ski Area in Princeton. "He made a joke," spokeswoman Shawn Feddeman said. 