Anatomy
of a snow-storm clean-up
By Michael Trusiak
By Michael Trusiak
BATHURST – Winter can be an icicle-in-the-side for
many of Canada’s municipalities, especially for ones on the east-coast.
How
much money for the winter budget? Do we
have enough plows? And where to put all
that snow, are common conundrums for cities and towns.
On the other hand, you may not have much of a winter
at all, thanks to the unpredictable nature of old-man-winter.
You might have a wet winter, a conservative one or
it could just be a full blown snowpocalypse.
It also takes a tremendous amount of time, recourses
and planning to coordinate a winter-storm clean-up.
Either way, towns like Bathurst along with their
city workers must clear the streets, sidewalks and thoroughfares for people and
the municipality to go about their daily jobs.
"Winter
is coming!"
Todd Pettigrew is Bathursts’ city engineer and along
with fleet manager Ron Scott are tasked with planning and coordinating
clean-ups after storms.
The first thing that happens before the first snow
flake falls is of course, checking the weather.
“Right off the bat we have what we call an emergency
response,” he explains. “We have a foreman
assigned 24 hours a day for a week at a time who’s on call and monitors the
situation of snow fall during the evening and during the night, but during the
day it would be the foreman Ron who’d be working on that.
“The second the roads begin to get slippery, we have
‘emergency routes’ that (we have to plow) with our three plow trucks to keep
those ‘emergency routes’ open throughout the storm.”
Each plow is assigned to clear one of the two routes
used for emergency responders like police and ambulance as well as important
residential, commercial areas like schools and the city centres.
One section is divided into 60 kilometres of roads
while the other is made up of approximately 70 kilometres.
“So they can start immediately, depending on the
storm, whether it’s freezing rain or when it starts to build up or when we know
there’s going to be a storm, there are different factors that are looked at so
that our salt trucks, plow trucks do these routes one and two.”
As Scott mentions though, that amount of infrastructure
takes time to clear.
“And that takes us usually 4-5 hours from where he
(the plow driver) starts to when he gets back to that point,” said Scott.
“But these things will run as long as it’s safe and
visibility is good,” Pettigrew reiterates.
“If visibility is bad we’ll have to take them off the road.”
The other sections and sub-divisions that snake in
and around Bathurst are then left to the eight, outsourced contractors to clear.
“There are nine plowing routes throughout the city
and once 3 inches of snow has accumulated or if we know it’s going to be a big
storm, we’ll call in a contractor, but […] it depends on a lot of different
situations,” says Pettigrew.
When to call in the contractors, as Scott explains,
is up to them.
“We monitor the weather because it might say it’ll
start at midnight,” says Scott. “But
only starts at two, three in the morning, so we monitor and make our judgment
call then.”
Eight of the nine contracted routes go to
independent contractors in and around the Bathurst area, but public works is in
charge of clearing one of the nine.
“And we don’t
stop plowing until the storm is over and everything is cleaned up. If they do their run and it’s still snowing
they’ll do it over again.
“Normally those runs will take up to 8-9 hours
(each).”
As Pettigrew points out, the reason it seems to take
so long to plow each route is because the trucks can only plow to the right
side of a curb.
What
to do with all that snow
Once the road and sidewalk crews have plowed the
snow into banks along the sides of the streets and the storm has stopped, the
city calls in their snow removal team.
Snow in major downtown sections like King Street and
St. Peters has to be trucked away within 48-hours and usually done by one night
shift working from midnight to 8:00am while everyone is off the road.
“We take the sidewalk plows and plow it out on to
the street then the loaders with the plows come and plow the roads and then the
blower comes and loads it into the trucks,” Scott explains.
The city owns and operates only one snow blower that
attaches to a front-end loader, but devours snow banks at an insatiable rate.
“Actually its 2700-tons an hour so you can load a
tractor-trailer in about 18 seconds if there’s lots of snow,” says Scott.
“We usually hire
five trucks, five tractor-trailers to haul the snow and we have a snow blower and
we are the ones who remove the snow other than the trucks.”
Then comes the hundreds-of-kilometres of intertwined
secondary roads, subdivisions and sidewalks that also need to have their banks
removed.
This is without question the most time consuming
part of a winter storm clean-up in Bahturst and it can be doubly true if there
are multiple storms within a couple of days.
Two-weeks ago that was the case.
“Last storm we had about 67 cm plus the snow from
the previous storm so we had over 100cm,” Scott recalled. “It took us a whole week, running 16-hour
days, two shifts, running midnight-4pm for the snow to be removed.”
Streets without sidewalks usually have the tops of
their banks pushed back by way of the plows’ side-blade raised 3-feet off the
ground, a term referred to as “benching”.
“The most important part for us is we have to have
some place to put the snow,” Pettigrew says.
“We have to make sure there is enough room to push the snow back,
otherwise the roads will get narrower and narrower.
“Plus with freezing conditions if it freezes you are
not going to be able to push that snow back.”
A
salty situation
Public works is always looking for more efficient
ways to combat old-man-winter.
One of the most important aspects of keeping the
roads clear is of course road salt.
Bathurst and other municipalities have been using
salt coated with a specific mixture of brine (concentrated solution of salt in
water) to help reduce the amount of road salt used on streets by 33 percent
according to Scott.
“We have a mixer back at our salt dome that mixes
it,” explains Scott. “The water runs
through the mixer and when the water gets to 23 percent, then it stays in the
holding tank, then we pump it into our trucks into these tanks.”
This 23 percent salt-water mixture helps prevent the
bonding of snow-ice to the road surface.
Composite tanks which hold the brine are mounted to
each side of the plows and are connected to the salt spreader via a series of
hoses.
The tubes then spray the salt just as it falls from
the spreader which is synchronized with the trucks’ drivetrain to better
control the amount of salt falling onto the road.
The solution is only effective however at melting
snow in a narrow temperature range below freezing, known as the eutectic point.
As Pettigrew explains (see phase diagram below), it has more to do with science and chemistry than
simply quantity.
Source: Environment Canada
“Now
say I move to between 25-30 percent salt solution, it drops the freezing point
back up to 0 degrees.
“So that’s a fine line
where you don’t want to add too much, because it’s not working. And people say ‘add more salt, add more
salt,’ well, adding more salt […] actually makes it worse.”
The solution can also be added to the road surface
up to 48-hours before even the first snowflake falls from an incoming storm, so
when the snow hits the ground, it just melts and doesn’t freeze.
How
much snow is too much snow
Winter is a natural part of life in the Maritimes.
It just so happens that we’ve become very good at
dealing with whatever it throws at us, thanks to more advanced technology, a
lot of planning and capable people.
But winter still manages to get the better of us
sometimes, even the ones charged with cleaning it up.
“Ahh, the worst one for me was about 4-5 years ago,”
recalls Scott. “It snowed mostly during
the night and visibility was nil, like you just couldn’t see a thing.
“It was probably about 60cm but the wind blew so
hard during that storm that we stopped all the plows.
“We even had a contractor come by here (public works
building) and one of the guys had to walk out there and find him and lead him
into the yard with a flash light. Visibility
was nill everywhere!
“And we did have an ambulance call during that and
one of the plow trucks found their way through to the ambulance to a seniors
home to get that person out. That was
the worst I’ve ever seen.”
Pettigrew also remembers it, “That was my first-year.”
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Power loss: New Brunswick not yet ready for Electric Car
By Michael Trusiak
WOODSTOCK - To
quote a famous 1996 car commercial, “the electric car is here.” Well the electric car has come and gone, only
to be risen from the dead 15 years later.
In December
2010, GM and Nissan unveiled the next generation of electric vehicles (EV): the
Chevrolet Volt and Nissan Leaf. As with everything
in the automotive business, their competitors also want a piece of the green
pie and are jumping on the electric band-wagon once again.
Throughout
2012, there will be a surge of EVs coming to market: The Toyota Rav4 Electric, Mitsubishi MiEV,
and the Ford Focus Electric, to name a few.
The Volt, Leaf and MiEV have just gone on sale this past year in the
Great White North, but only in select cities.
While all
this talk of EVs might have people feeling warm and fuzzy inside, the fact
remains this technology is still in its infancy and requires an infrastructure
to properly support it.
So is New
Brunswick ready for the Electric Revolution 2.0?
B-EV, in this place
New
Brunswick is the second smallest province by population and geography in
Canada. The province’s rural landscape
is dotted with villages, towns and cities, few and far between.
Winters are
also a defining characteristic of New Brunswick, as with the rest of the
country. In the past few years we have
had several record breaking winters in terms of snowfall.
Trucks too
are a big part of our landscape; with one-fourth of all vehicles on the road
being a truck.
So why would
anyone want to buy an electric car here and risk being swallowed by snowdrifts,
stranded in between towns or emasculated by F-150 drivers.
EV
technology has changed quite a bit since the late nineties, when the first wave
of electric cars began washing-up onto the California landscape. These EVs where expensive, used nickel-metal
batteries (opposed to the more efficient lithium-ion batteries used in EVs
today) and did not have the sort of green movement that many states or
provinces have today. Not to mention
they were only available in the sunshine state.
Greg LeBlanc
is the climate change coordinator at Falls Brook Centre near Knowlesville. He believes the time is right for electric
vehicles.
“I think that
there is a number of reinforcing factors today that just weren’t there ten
years ago when the first movement of electric vehicles started,” said
LeBlanc. “People are so much more
conscious now of climate change and gas prices, you know those types of aspects.”
LeBlanc says
that in order to have a sustainable infrastructure for EVs, there must be a
replacement for the proverbial gasoline structure, currently in place.
“A lot of
people are still going to be on the go, so what’s happening on the west coast
of the U.S. is that there is a pilot project developing sort of an “electric”
gas station where people can recharge their EV’s in about the same time as a
gasoline powered car,” said LeBlanc.
These fast
charging stations however are still being developed and use a large amount of
energy, in the span of minutes to fully recharge an electric car.
“The easier
steps are hooking up homes, businesses, retail stores and other places where
people park their cars with 240 volt electric connectors,” said LeBlanc.
All EV
manufacturers are offering a 240-volt charger upgrade from a standard
120-volt. While this may cost an extra
$2,000, it will also significantly decrease the charging time of the car. For example:
A Nissan Leaf will take about 16 hours to fully recharge on a 120-volt
outlet; but cars charged through a 240-volt connector, like the one running
your washing machine, will only take eight hours to charge.
There may
also be an EV mentality already ingrained in the minds of not just New
Brunswicker’s, but Canadians, thanks to the prevalent use of block heaters.
Trying to
start your car in 40 below weather is always a tense moment. Those first few seconds of listening to the engine
struggle can melt a snowman.
Fortunately, block heaters have made this process much easier.
The concept
is not much different for recharging an electric car. The exception is, instead of plugging in your
car on the coldest of nights, you’re doing it every day.
Power overwhelming?
Despite
having the added, feel-good mentality of not burning fossil fuels, electricity
does not grow on trees.
NB Power
estimates that an electric car in New Brunswick would consume an extra 3000 kWh
per year; about the same as a water heater or $24 more on your monthly power
bill.
While the
cost would be hundreds of dollars less than what a normal gas powered car would
cost in a year, could this added power consumption affect the province’s energy
distribution.
Melissa
Morton is a spokesperson for NB Power.
She says the company is confident it can deal with the added weight of
an EV infrastructure.
“Electric
Vehicles are still an emerging market in the province but we have been doing
extensive research on them. As far as
our distribution system goes, we (NB Power) don’t expect EVs will pose a significant
strain on it, as EVs would most likely be charged during off-peak hours,” said
Morton.
Smart Grids
are an emerging concept towards how energy is distributed to households. They effectively communicate with houses
connected to a specific grid and determine the most efficient time to power
your appliances, lights or, in this case, recharge your electric vehicle.
“You plug-in
your car and it talks to the grid and says I need this much energy to recharge
my battery,” says LeBlanc. “Then the
grid says back to it ‘well maybe you can wait an hour because that is when we
expect to be generating a lot of wind’ or ‘people will be going to bed.’”
Critics and
aficionados of the electric car have debated since the dawn-of-time, whether
charging your EV through fossil fuels like coal plants actually qualifies as ‘zero
emissions’.
“If we
continue to hold on to a lot of our fossil fuel generation then electric
vehicles won’t be as clean as they are touted to be,” said Leblanc. “Yeah, you might be getting off not burning
gas in your tank in your vehicle but you’re just transitioning that to a coal
plant a hundred kilometres away.”
30% of New
Brunswick’s energy consumption comes from renewable energy sources such as
hydro, wind and bio-mass. The government
is planning to increase that number to 40% by 2016.
The electric players
So which cars
will hit the New Brunswick market?
Well, the
first electric car to go on sale last fall in Canada was the crown techno-jewel
of the new General Motors: the
Chevrolet Volt. But it is a little more
complicated than that.
The Volt or
EV’s in general are not your typical mass-produced car. As blasphemous as this may sound, they are
more of a specialty vehicle right now, like say a Bentley or Porsche 911, for
environmentalists.
While the
Volt is already being sold across Canada in select markets, Matthew Toner, Sales
Manager at CYV Chevrolet, said New Brunswick will have to wait a little longer
to see the Volt.
“Probably
late 2012-13. What will happen is dealerships
will most likely need a special license to order them in and stock them,” said
Toner. “The larger cities (like Halifax
and Saint John) will probably be the first ones to start selling them in the
Atlantic region.”
Toner also
said dealerships will have to spend a certain amount of money upgrading and
training their mechanics in order to carry the Volt.
As for the
Nissan Leaf, it has just hit the market, with the first one being picked up
last October. Meanwhile, New Brunswick –
and Atlantic Canada for that matter – appear to be looking in from the outside
as Quebec, Ontario and BC all venture into electric-car-happy-land.
This, of
course, is reflective of the infrastructure or lack thereof in the province.
“We are
quite a ways away in New Brunswick because the government hasn’t really taken a
lot of action on moving in that direction yet,” said Leblanc. “It really takes the prerogative of the
province working with the utility to set up the infrastructure.”
The Electric
car is here, perhaps for good. It’ll just take a little more time getting to
New Brunswick.
Side Bar
The pure breeds
Unlike the
Volt which has a small gas powered engine (just in case), the Nissan Leaf and
electric version of the Ford Focus are 100% gas-free. The Leaf’s 24-kWh lithium-ion battery (like
the smaller ones in laptops) has enough juice for 160 kilometers (100 miles) on
a single charge. The Focus has a similar
sized battery offering 23-kWh, which Ford claims will match the Leaf’s driving range.
Also
Canadian auto parts giant, Magna International developed the Focus’ entire
electric powertrain.
The Focus
and Leaf are also dripping with more gizmos and gadgets than the Star-ship
Enterprise. Both cars sport LCD screens
in the centre console that can display anything from the cars’ climate, radio
and navigation controls. The car can also
notify you where the nearest charging station is, the most efficient route and
how much energy the car will consume. As
with many EVs and hybrids they usually come with an eco-driving coaching
feature that lets the driver know how efficient his/her driving is. For instance, the Focus’ LCD screen displays
a “flock” of butterflies when driving.
The more aggressive you drive, the more butterflies will fly away off
the screen. The Leaf and Volt also have
their own variation of this.
All three
vehicles also have their own set of special apps for smartphones that connect
directly to the car. You can set when
you want to charge the car; find it in a parking lot using GPS; or the vehicle
itself will notify you when it’s done charging.
Volt:
It’s not actually an electric vehicle.
To clarify,
the Chevrolet Volt is not an electric car; GM insists on calling it a Range-Extended
Electric Vehicle. In layman’s terms, that
means it essentially has two power sources; a large, 16-kWh lithium-ion
battery, coupled with an electric generator as the primary power source; and a
small 1.4 litre, 4 cylinder gasoline engine to extend the range when the
battery runs out – hence the name. With
both sources, the Volt will get an estimated combined fuel economy of 153 mpg (imperial). But it is a little more complicated and
intuitive than that.
The Volt can
run on pure battery power for about 40-80 kilometers, below 112 km/h (70 mph). Once it accelerates above 112 km/h, the gas
engine kicks in to help power the wheels.
However, the range of the battery is also dependent on how hard the car
is driven. City driving is where the
Volt truly shines, like any other EV or hybrid.
If your daily commute is less than the 40-80 kilometers between charging
times, chances are you may never see a gas station.
The simplest
way to describe how the Volts’ powertrain works would probably be how an
average household furnace operates. When
it gets too cold in the house, the furnace kicks in to maintain the set
temperature. When the battery depletes
or when the Volt is under hard acceleration, the engine activates to drive the car.
The two systems complement each other,
taking turns to power the car under certain circumstances, until you get back
home or run out of gas.
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