Don't be envious of your neighbour's snowblower. Be envious of the city's snowblowers.
Those snowblowers are key to cutting down the snow banks and clearing the roads after the Family Day weekend's snowfall caused the city to declare it's second significant weather event of the month.
"The No. 1 focus of declaring a weather event is the safety of people on the roads," said Roger Young, the city's general manager of environment and infrastructure services.
Young and other city managers and councillors met on Family Day to talk about the weather event and make plans going forward, said Young.
"Some of these storms come with accumulation that is so intense, that even when we are actively working through them, the accumulation presents challenges elsewhere within the network," he said.
The city has 450 kilometres of road to maintain and must have at least a five-metre lane width for municipal roads.
"The snow banks are so tall, we are running out of space to store the snow at the edge of the road. We are at the point of losing that five-metre width, so we have to run a snowbank removal operation in some of our neighbourhoods," said Young.
"We really are at the point where we have to amp up and increase our snow removal we are removing across the city. Snow storage has become a problem," he told OrilliaMatters Tuesday.
Orillia has three mega snowblowers including its John Deere tractor with a snowblower on the front that is 10 feet wide and six feet tall. (One of the blowers is broken down).
"They are absolutely massive snow moving machines," said Young. "You have one blower for 15 to 20 trucks. The blower fills the trucks incredibly fast as it works along the bank."
Most of the work is done at night as there are cars parked along the roadways during the day.
"We can complete about five kilometres of snow bank removal per evening. Last night we called in 30 (contracted) trucks and two blowers that we have in the city. We are going to continue that for the next three nights," said Young.
"We know that the area we will most likely expand our fleet is with the blowers," he said.
OrilliaMatters caught the shift change at the city's Operations Centre on James Street.
While mechanics are busy working in the indoor bays, the machines come in at lunch for a period of melt down before the new shift heads out before 1 p.m. for a shift that could be eight or up to 14 hours depending on what's needed.
Snow removal is "very costly" and is a significant operation, added Young.
The city's budget for winter control is approximately $1.5 million. That includes labour and materials, such as salt.
"Labour is covered until the end of the season. We will see some overtime overage, but we are not able to calculate that yet," he explained.
"Our drivers are operating their 70 hours a week and we are maximizing the amount of overtime that the crews are able to work," said Young.
"We are going to exceed our budget for salt," he said.
"What we are seeing that is new this year is the need for more contracted services," he said.
Local weather watcher David Brain said almost 170 cm of snow has fallen in February — the most in a single month in his more than 45 years of monitoring Orillia's weather.