Hamilton’s ‘snow mountains’ grow by the day as storm cleanup continues

City crews are still cleaning up and trucking away as many as 300 truckloads of snow a day from clogged streets nearly 10 days after a record storm dumped half a metre of the white stuff on Hamilton.

Acting transportation operations head Mike Field said while plows did the bulk of street-clearing last week, there's only so much room to store snow on the edges of urban streets.

Just because of the sheer volume of snow, we had a lot of large snow piles ending up along sidewalks and curb areas that we need to remove," he said, adding that requires literally shovelling snow into trucks and off-loading it at designated dump sites.

As of Tuesday, 145,000 tonnes of snow - about 20,000 large, frozen elephants-worth - had been dumped.

Most of the snow ends up at two main locations: on Upper Ottawa Street near the Linc and at the empty West Harbour lot on Barton Street West that once held the old Rheem factory.

Those sites both boast snow mountains" that will only get taller as periodic smaller snowfalls continue to add to boulevard piles. We run between 200 and 300 dump truck loads of snow a day and we're still on a seven-days-a-week, 24-hour operation," he said.

It's still a constant stream of trucks."

Matthew Van Dongen is a transportation and environment reporter at for The Spectator. mvandongen@thespec.com