With Chicago, New York, and Boston buried, they are trying the best they can to get the city out from under the thick blanket of snow, this well known satirical image of Al Gore using a flamethrower comes to mind:
Liv writes in the MIT alumni forum that truth is often stranger than fiction, because Boston city government did in fact propose using flamethrowers to remove snow.
Sixty three years ago Boston received so much snow that then Mayor James Curley took a look at it and began pleading with then MIT President Dr. Karl Compton for help. “I am very desirous that [MIT] have a competent group of engineers make an immediate study as to ways and means of removing the huge accumulation,” he wrote, “…be it by the use of flame throwers or chemicals or otherwise.” The mayor was desperate.
Sound familiar? Current Mayor Thomas Menino was quoted yesterday exclaiming, “This is relentless; it just doesn’t stop coming.” Indeed, Boston has already received more than 60 inches of snow this winter, some 20 more than the seasonal average, and more is on the way. Federal law prevents the city from dumping snow into the Charles River (too many contaminants), so the city is charged with finding ever more places to pile ever higher mountains of snow.
An article over the weekend in the New York Times pointed out that other cities, like Minneapolis, have dealt with this problem by investing in snow dragons, which are pricey machines capable of melting, filtering, and safely disposing of 30 tons of snow per hour. According to the Times piece, Boston has rebuffed the idea in the past but is reconsidering. Public Works Commissioner Joanne Massaro says that “any option is on the table.”
Any option, including reaching out to MIT?
“No,” says MIT Facilities Director John DiFava, “We haven’t heard from the Mayor’s office.” It’s probably for the best, since the crews are already busy. In the last few weeks, they have been working around the clock to deal with the record snow.
“At this point, it’s not necessarily the clearing it away, it’s the getting rid of it,” says DiFava. “When the snow first starts to come you plow it out of the way, but as it builds and doesn’t melt you start to lose space. It starts to fill in and the streets get smaller and the walkways get smaller, and then you’re faced with trucking it out.”
DiFava says MIT crews are piling snow in a campus recycling lot and several other lots in the northwest part of campus.
“We’re lucky to have property on campus where we can pile it,” he says, “but if this keeps up, they’ll close too. Then, I don’t know what.”
Time to dig out those flamethrowers?
h/t to Alek O. Komarnitsky
@ur momisugly Deborah
I suspect your local utility would be happy to pay for the pavement heaters and their installation if you agree to run them so many nights a year. That should give you an idea of how viable your idea is.
Kind of like the local gas company giving and installing free pool heaters to anyone who wants one down her in south Alabama. I had a friend take them up on that deal. His first bill for heating his pool for a December weekend was over $1000.
Seriously? The snow is allowed to melt naturally and flow into the Charles River, picking up more contaminants as it flows, but cannot be dumped there?
I suggest the city of Boston simply ignore any federal prohibitions against the practice and pay the fines. How expensive can it be? The city of Atlanta has been sending raw sewage south in the Chattahoochee River since forever because it’s cheaper than upgrading its sewage system to keep pace with growth.
How can Atlanta get away with dumping raw sewage and Boston can’t get away with dumping snow?
A lot of soot on top does wonders when you have
Thanks Mike G, but I don’t ask anybody to pay for anything for myself. I do fine without subsidies. And as for the viability of my idea, I’m not heating a pool in December up to 80 degrees… I’d be heating a driveway up to 35 degrees in the winter. Just a few degrees above freezing should be enough to help dislodge the ice from my driveway and keep my truck (yes, full size at that) from bottoming out from the extra curb height left behind from the city plows going by.
I saw a news program this evening that gave interesting information about how Chicago plans on dealing with all their snow. Apparently they use these big yellow boxes that have jet engines screaming into them, and they use front end loaders to dump snow into them. They called them “snow melters”, and they show one in action. The snow melts and goes down the storm sewers at O’Hare. Here is the video:
http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=news/local&id=7938188
I wonder what the urban heat island effect 15 of these have on the “official temperature” kept at O’Hare?
I’ll happily take funding (and lots of it) to put my name into development for dealing with the problem of stubborn snow. Just need a small reactor and a large fan. Worried about impending ice ages and advancing glaciers? No problem, fixed installations could also be provided.
Good idea until you realize that the snow melts then refreezes where it does the most damage.
So if Arctic ice reflects solar energy back into space and keeps the oceans from absorbing heat (heard that somewhere) Does snow on the ground in do the same thing for land?
The picture is a fake, we all know that Gore gets his masseuses to do his dirty work.
Clearly we need to compress all the piles of snow into blocks of ice and transport them to the Himalayas to restore the glaciers there. /sarc
Even better, we could send it all to the Arctic to keep it from going ice free in the next few years. That would probably be cheaper than a lot of Al Gore’s ‘global warming’ schemes.
Anthony, I used the above picture in another weekend fun re Al Gore cartoons, http://funwithgovernment.blogspot.com/2011/02/weekend-fun-8-al-gore-cartoons-c.html. Thank you.
So, how much snow did fall in 1948?
The Sun, in heating my black asphalt driveway does the trick if I just remove most of the white stuff that sends the Sun’s helping rays right back. When I had it retopped with new blacker asphalt a few years ago, I made them dig out a couple of inches on both sides of the old driveway surface to get nice new straight edges, so the driveway is now about 4 inches wider than before. This has doubtless caused my local urban heat ialand’s temperature to increase, and helped GISS to promote its flawed graph of increasing global temperature as measured by improperly sited land-based thermometers. I should be ashamed, but GISS should be more so!
Something like this? http://forums.jetcareers.com/general-topics/116642-russian-snow-removal-jet-engines.html
http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2009/08/jet-engines-on-trucks-for-fun-and.html
The Al Gore action figure. “He’ll make global warming one way or another!”
Mr. Trenberth, are you looking for that missing
warmthglobal warming?I have lived on snow and ice. Tire chains. It’s a little bit of work, but it’s not a mystery.