Another major snow removal operation is underway in the city of Montreal — but not before some of the city's hospital emergency rooms wound up treating more people than usual for falls and broken bones.
Urgences Sante is reporting an uptick in calls from people who've been slipping on Montreal's icy streets over the past week.
Last Tuesday, a day-long freezing rain storm turned Montreal's streets into a sheet of ice. The freezing rain, incidentally, came after a 10-centimetre snowfall — and once all of that froze over by Tuesday night in a flash freeze, streets were coated in a dense, crusty layer of half-melted snow, making parking on city streets a challenge, to say the least.
Sidewalks, meantime, were difficult to navigate for pedestrians. Many of them were barely salted or gravelled. Some weren't at all.
Verdun mayor Jean-François Parenteau, the city's point man on snow management, apologized for what he referred to as a miscalculation.
He says the city opted to hold off on another large-scale snow removal operation in the hopes that rain and mild temperatures in the forecast would do the job for them.
Parenteau belatedly ordered crews on snow removal duty on Sunday night, and by late Monday afternoon, the job of removing the sometimes rock-hard snow from our streets and sidewalks is more than a quarter of the way done.
In the borough of Anjou, the job was actually completed last week — the borough proceeding with snow removal without the central city's consent.
The boroughs of Outremont, St. Leonard and the Southwest borough are just about half done.