Fire up the melter

Fire up the melter

Bill McAuliffe
Minneapolis Star Tribune
December 15, 2010

There's shoveling. There's plowing. There's trucking it away.

Now Minneapolis is bringing another strategy to snow removal: melting.

Armed with what they regard as the only municipally owned snow melter in Minnesota, Minneapolis officials are hoping they've found a new way to get rid of snow at a time when some of the long-favored industrial dumping sites have been transformed by condominiums.

"Snow storage is at a premium," said John Scharffbillig, director of the fleet services division of the city's public works department. "It's a way for us to manage snow this deep, and some big piles."

But homeowners shouldn't expect the melter to help them deal with the 17.1 inches of snow that fell last weekend and continues to bedevil urban neighborhoods. The new tool is only big enough to melt snow collected from around parking meters and intersections downtown, and a few other key locations.

Vital statistics

The melter is basically a 9 million BTU biodiesel-fired cauldron. It can melt 30 tons of snow an hour, separating pollutants and trash from roughly 160 gallons of water per minute. Then it sends the water -- "cleaner than the snow we dump into it," Scharffbillig said -- down a storm drain or into a retention pond. It burns 53 gallons of biodiesel fuel an hour.

The recent snow -- the fifth-most to fall at one time on the Twin Cities -- weighs about 8.5 pounds per cubic foot, according to assistant state DNR climatologist Pete Boulay. Thirty tons of it would cover roughly a block and a half of Minneapolis residential sidewalk. That's a lot to shovel, but a small speck compared to all the city's streets, sidewalks and alleys that need clearing.

"It's one tool in our arsenal," said Mike Kennedy, Minneapolis transportation maintenance supervisor. "I actually envision some day having one small site with a major melter or a couple of major large melters permanently in place, like the airport. For now it's just a small piece."

Minneapolis had several mobile melters several decades ago, but it took several people to operate and feed them. They clogged often, spit dirty water down the storm drains, were noisy, and used nearly twice as much diesel as their successor. The city stopped using them when fuel prices soared during the oil embargo in the early 1970s, and scrapped them in '75.

The city bought the new melter with federal money as part of the transit upgrade along 2nd Avenue and Marquette Avenue downtown. It cost $250,000, with the federal government covering $200,000 of that. It arrived in October, but city workers have only recently begun experimenting with it. The plan is to go live with it later this week.

Twin City Outdoor Services, one of the state's largest snow-removal companies, has two melters it hauls to shopping centers, office parks and other snow-be-gone clients. It services several others around the metro area, including two in parking ramps at Methodist Hospital in St. Louis Park. Co-owner Rich Byrne said the company has been busy signing up new clients.

Byrne added that architects and planners frequently overlook snow removal needs in building design and layout. They often install decorative fountains and planters in obstructive places, and tend to not consider increasing distances to dump sites. Recent mild winters may have led builders to become more relaxed about snow-removal, Byrne added.

Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport has 37 melters similar to the Minneapolis device in use near plane de-icing areas and in parking ramps. Even with that many, most of the airport's snow still gets pushed into open areas.

"Obviously we can't melt 17.1 inches of snow that falls over the entire airport," said Paul Sichko, assistant director of operations at MSP. But the melters help reduce the cost of plowing and trucking snow away, and keep revenue-producing parking spaces open.

Tom Sweeney, Star Tribune

Look familiar? The recent snow weighs about 8.5 pounds per cubic foot, and you don’t need to be reminded how tough it is to shovel. But hark! The city has a new disposal weapon in its arsenal. Unfortunately, it won’t help the owner of this car on Lyndale Avenue S. near W. 28th Street.

Now there's something I'd have never thought of in designing an office building - snow removal.

It makes me wonder how ancient civilizations dealt with snowfall.

dblboggie wrote:It makes me wonder how ancient civilizations dealt with snowfall.

Uh-huh... Well, since they most likely didn't have very much infrastructure in which to worry about (much less dig out from under), they probably just let it melt.

i_luv_miley wrote:

dblboggie wrote:It makes me wonder how ancient civilizations dealt with snowfall.

Uh-huh... Well, since they most likely didn't have very much infrastructure in which to worry about (much less dig out from under), they probably just let it melt.

Actually some of these ancient and medieval cities were quite large with quite a lot of infrastructure. Rome's empire and her roads and aqueducts covered vast distances; the roads more so than the aqueducts. One wonders how or even if they dealt with snow during winter months in her northern provinces.

dblboggie wrote:

i_luv_miley wrote:

dblboggie wrote:It makes me wonder how ancient civilizations dealt with snowfall.

Uh-huh... Well, since they most likely didn't have very much infrastructure in which to worry about (much less dig out from under), they probably just let it melt.

Actually some of these ancient and medieval cities were quite large with quite a lot of infrastructure. Rome's empire and her roads and aqueducts covered vast distances; the roads more so than the aqueducts. One wonders how or even if they dealt with snow during winter months in her northern provinces.

Your initial question said ancient. Rome is not ancient. I'm talking Mesopotamia-age, for example. They were also civilizations but I say again, their infrastructure, even compared to Rome, was miniscule. If something happened, they dealt with it. If they didn't, they died. Many civilizations of the time met both fates. You had to learn to adapt or else. Luckily as civilizations advanced and turned into those like Rome, systems were put in place (i.e. big, bad government) to try to make things run as smooth as possible during crises. Did that always work? Of course not. But it did help.

i_luv_miley wrote:

dblboggie wrote:It makes me wonder how ancient civilizations dealt with snowfall.

Uh-huh... Well, since they most likely didn't have very much infrastructure in which to worry about (much less dig out from under), they probably just let it melt.

Maybe so in small towns in those days. But London or Berlin weren't little hamlets in those days. Nothing like today, of course. Interesting though.

dblboggie wrote:

i_luv_miley wrote:

dblboggie wrote:It makes me wonder how ancient civilizations dealt with snowfall.

Uh-huh... Well, since they most likely didn't have very much infrastructure in which to worry about (much less dig out from under), they probably just let it melt.

Actually some of these ancient and medieval cities were quite large with quite a lot of infrastructure. Rome's empire and her roads and aqueducts covered vast distances; the roads more so than the aqueducts. One wonders how or even if they dealt with snow during winter months in her northern provinces.

The major issue was not so much about infrastructure as it was about mobility. I'll give a more detailed description in the thread you created.

i_luv_miley wrote:Rome is not ancient.

Rome was founded in the 8th century BC and its population is said to have reach 1 million some time in the 1st century.

The_Amber_Spyglass wrote:

dblboggie wrote:

i_luv_miley wrote:

dblboggie wrote:It makes me wonder how ancient civilizations dealt with snowfall.

Uh-huh... Well, since they most likely didn't have very much infrastructure in which to worry about (much less dig out from under), they probably just let it melt.

Actually some of these ancient and medieval cities were quite large with quite a lot of infrastructure. Rome's empire and her roads and aqueducts covered vast distances; the roads more so than the aqueducts. One wonders how or even if they dealt with snow during winter months in her northern provinces.

The major issue was not so much about infrastructure as it was about mobility. I'll give a more detailed description in the thread you created.

Infrastructure and mobility are very much related though. That was my point above - as well as differing "ancient" from "medieval"... Of course as soon as civilizations (or whatever you want to call them - i.e cities, cultures, peoples) reach a certain amount of infrastructure, mobility becomes much more difficult. But for the earliest civilizations (which is what I was talking about above), they just hadn't reached that level - and so when they had a problem (i.e. too much rain, too much snow, too much sun, not enough food etc.), they either found another location better suited to them. Or they ceased to exist. In short, they adapted... Of course by Greek and Roman times, moving to another area wasn't an option. But by then they (as a people, society, whatever) had advanced enough to create sytems (i.e. government) to help them deal with these situations.

You're basically talking about caveman times.

TexasBlue wrote:You're basically talking about caveman times.

I'm actually talking about ninety percent of human history.

Well then, I must be the other 10%

i_luv_miley wrote:But for the earliest civilizations (which is what I was talking about above), they just hadn't reached that level - and so when they had a problem (i.e. too much rain, too much snow, too much sun, not enough food etc.), they either found another location better suited to them.

Such as which civilisations? Mesopotamia - as the earliest - had an advanced infastructure and had cities so large that it would be the Minoan Empire before we would see organisation on that scale again.

i_luv_miley wrote:Or they ceased to exist. In short, they adapted... Of course by Greek and Roman times, moving to another area wasn't an option. But by then they (as a people, society, whatever) had advanced enough to create sytems (i.e. government) to help them deal with these situations.

Well not really. Urbanisation and civilisation create problems of their own. I know I keep recommending this book but Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Complex Societies Choose to Fail or Survive is an excellent insight into problems in the past as well as some we face in the future.