Mother Nature isn’t co-operating with the city’s new reduced service winter operations plan. The first serious dumping of snow, which came over a three-day period starting Saturday, created havoc across the community and grounding school buses.
The following is a letter by Greg Clausen, the general manager of infrastructure services, which was distributed at the city's priorities meeting tonight (Dec. 5).This report will provide council with an update on the winter storm that hit the city on Saturday, December 1 and continued to Monday, December 3, 2007. This report is further to my information emails sent on Sunday, December 2 and Monday, December 3, 2007.
Approximately 10 cm of snow fell overnight on Saturday, December 1 and Sunday, December 2. Our City crews were called out at midnight to service the Class 1 to 3 arterial and collector roads.
At about 5:00 a.m., Sunday, about 8 cm of snow had accumulated and all contractors were called out to service all Class 4 to 6, residential and rural roads.
All sidewalk plows were called out at about 9:00 a.m. Sunday morning.
A total of about 80 units were mobilized by 9:00 a.m. The equipment stayed in operation until after the storm ended on Monday. All streets and sidewalks were serviced were serviced at least two times. Over this period, blowing and drifting snow on Sunday and Monday compounded and slowed down the plowing operation.
In accordance with the new Winter Control Policy which was approved by Council in March of 2007 as part of the 2007 Operating Budget Review, the new policy aims to have all Class 4 to 6 roads plowed and sanded within 24 hours hours of the storm’s completion.
With only a few exceptions, all Class 4 to 6 streets and sidewalks were plowed and sanded by 5:00 a.m. Monday morning (24 hours from the initial call out). While dealing with the first snowfall, an additional 10 cm of snow fell overnight on Sunday, December 2 and Monday, December 3, 2007. All City crews and contractors had converted to 12 hours shifts and kept all equipment working continuously until the storm stopped and all streets and sidewalks were plowed a minimum of a second time by 5:00 a.m. on Tuesday, December 4, 2007.
We had approximately 20 cm of snow over a 3 day period (Saturday to Monday). This was the first major snow fall since the “famous” three major storms of February 2006. With minor exceptions, our City crews and contractors did an excellent job in handling this storm in a timely manner in accordance with the approved new policy.
During the storm, a number of weaknesses in the system were encountered and/or discovered by the City crews and/or the public. All breakdowns in service levels were immediately investigated by our Forepersons and Superintendents and corrected as soon as possible.
After the storm was over, a standard Post Storm Debriefing Session was held by all operational Superintendents, as well as our GIS-AVL technical staff, Dispatch and 3-1-1 staff on Monday afternoon. A number of items were discussed and are summarized herein for Council’s information. Similarly, a number of “fine tuning” adjustments will be implemented immediately to minimize potential similar problems in future storms/events.
These items are summarized as follows:
1) A number of streets were “missed” during the initial plowing operation due primarly to driver inexperienced and weakness in communication between staff and operators, etc. Once the street were identified by our AVL system they were immediately serviced.
Action: Our Forepersons will review all plow beats with all operators and ensure they stay on their dispatched routes and schedules. Operators will not leave their area until the local Roads Supervisor has confirmed with the AVL technical staff that all streets in that area have been serviced.
2) Our City 3-1-1 system which was called in to service on Sunday, December 2, 2007 by our Superintendents was inundated with calls to the point the system “bogged down”. Similarly, all the calls were forwarded to our Roads Forepersons who were unable to provide timely responses and at the same time fight the storm.
Action: 3-1-1 staff will arrange for additional staff and resources to handle these long duration storms.
3) Our Infrastructure Service Dispatchers were also called in on Sunday. The two Dispatchers could not keep up with the volume of calls, especially on Monday morning.
Action: Our Infrastructure Service Dispatchers will be supplemented with additional staff to handle these long duration storms. Similarly, our Dispatchers will be relocated to our Winter Control Centre at the Lionel E. Lalonde Centre where our AVL technical staff are permanently located. An approved hands on sharing of key information will not be possible.
4) Our computerized AVL system bogged down due to extreme usage both within the City and across eastern Canada by all municipalities and road authorities during this event.
Action: All AVL technical staff are working with both our IT staff and AVL technical provider to ensure that our and/or their system has increased capacity to permit timely access by our Dispatchers, AVL staff and Supervisors.
It is our goal to have our Dispatch staff handle all routine inquiries including when residents can expect to see a snow plow in their area, etc. Similarly, the Dispatch staff will investigate and handle all routine calls thereby permitting our Supervisors to “fight” the storm.
5) One plow beat could not be completed within the goal of 24 hours due to numerous reasons, primarily the length of beat and weather conditions.
Action: One additional beat will be immediately created to meet the targeted service delay times.
This additional beat will be reviewed over the next few storms to determine whether it should be made permanent. If crew efficiency and productivity increases with experience, it may be possible to eliminate this extra beat.
Similarly, we are continuing to develop a pool of additional truck plows and graders to supplement existing crews on an as-needed basis during especially heavy storms.
6) Numerous issues were encountered with the servicing of cul-de-sacs.
Action: All crews will be reminded /refreshed on the proper synchronized procedure of plowing streets and cul-de-sacs by our truck plows and 4 X 4’s and loaders. Better co-ordination between the larger plow trucks and 4 X 4’s will happen in future. We normally delay the call-out of 4 X 4’s by several hours to permit the road truck plows to get a jump on the storm.
7) Issues with mechanical servicing of “broken” equipment was encountered during the storm resulting in increased service time on some beats.
Action: Better co-ordination with our Fleet mechanical support section including additional staff and repair depots will be implemented during storm events.
8) A number of Ward Councillors have requested specific Ward meetings with their local Supervisors and staff to obtain a better appreciation of how a winter storm is handled.
Action: We proposed to offer tours of the Lionel E. Lalonde Centre for Councillors and Senior staff to see our Winter Control Centre “in action”. We will have all Depot Superintendents in attendance to meet the Councillors and staff one-on-one. Specified individual meetings will be scheduled as requested.
9) The Mayor and Councillors, staff and the 3-1-1 Call Centres were independently receiving similar calls/concerns from the public for service issues.
Action: The City has purchased the 3-1-1 Issue Manager System to record and track all telephone calls/inquiries. The system will not close out a file until the complaint/call has been dealt with. The system is able to record/log calls by time, date, geographical location and/or type of issue. The system helps in identifying problem areas and/or areas needing attention especially during storm events. We are requesting that everyone (the public, staff and Council) use only this system as a centralized clearing house for all calls. We will then be able to consistently handle all inquiries in a timely and efficient manner.
At present time, with calls going to Foreman, staff, the Mayor and Councillors we are not able to accurately compile all calls in a consistent format. Also, some calls were missed.
The 3-1-1 system is an excellent system and works well. We request that everyone use it to its maximum
10) A number of streets were not plowed to full width (curb to curb).This was do to several factors including driver experience, weather conditions, cars parked on the streets, etc.
Action: Within the next several days, crews will be going out and pushing back snow banks to widen the streets.
Councillors can anticipate a large number of calls from residents complaining they have just spent two days cleaning their driveways and now we got back and fill them in with snow.
It is necessary to widen the streets to maximum width to provide for both safe vehicular and pedestrian movement and to provide storage space for the next snow fall.
11) Because of the significant snowfall, we will be commencing snow removal operations in the City’s Central Business Districts (CBDs) starting this weekend assuming that no significant new snowfall events come in the interim. The snow removal will improve pedestrian traffic movements in these areas as well as improve on street parking at meter locations. We historically carry out one major snow removal operation in each CBD prior to Christmas. If Environment Canada is correct and we a colder than normal winter with more snow, we may well be into extensive snow removal operations this winter.
12) We will be providing Council a monthly financial report and verbal update detailing our monthly, year to date and projected annual winter control cost expenditures. With this report, Council will know monthly our Winter Control expenditures history.
Closure
We believe that a large percentage of the complaints that have been received are because the public does not understand/appreciate the new service levels/delivery times which Council has approved. We will remind the public to read the public flyer distributed to all households in the City last week and/or to read the City’s web page to get this information. We would be pleased to mail out additional copies of the flyer if requested.
In conclusion, City staff and contractors did an excellent job during this initial big storm but as always, we will continue to “fine tune” our operation to provide improved/better service in future.
