As a winter storm deposits at least a foot of snow on New York City this weekend, the city Department of Sanitation is mobilizing to fight off as many flakes as possible — a task that has fallen under its domain for a mere 132 years.
A plow and shovelers struggle their way through a 1926 storm’s legacy to New York City. Photo: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Civic leaders have had plenty of reasons to regret that ever since as they face a barrage of blame when things go wrong — most recently, in the mess of a late-December storm 2010. Robin Nagle, a New York University professor and resident anthropologist at the city’s Department of Sanitation, has had a unique opportunity to observe from within.
“It’s the kind of thing that is always scrutinized,” she said.
Snow management became one of the city’s formal responsibilities in 1881, under the Department of Street Cleaning, which turned into the Department of Sanitation several decades later, Nagle said. Before that, snow removal fell to a hodgepodge of neighborhood efforts, meaning that some streets got cleared quickly while others sat mired in snow and slush. City officials recognized they needed to even things out.
When the Blizzard of 1888 hit, the city Department of Street Cleaning was in charge of snow removal, or what there was of it. AP Photo
Other cities took it upon themselves to start organizing their snow removal efforts shortly after, spurred into action by the Great Blizzard of 1888, which killed more than 400 people, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. New York City’s decision to develop an underground subway system was also influenced by the event.
The need to get snow out of the way has sparked all manner of innovation over the years. Adding plows to the front of horse-drawn carriages traversing the roads was an easy and efficient way to do that, Nagle said. And of course, she said, “people have always shoveled and swept.”
Some of those shovels are particularly notable. In the late 1800s, relying largely on hand labor, street crews could sometimes spend eight to ten hours a day using shovels known as as “pan scrapers,” with seven-foot long handles and a blade made of exceptionally heavy metal, and wheels on the back to help with the task, Nagle said.
Crews treated roads with any substance — often ashes — that could help prevent slipping, Nagle said, a particular concern in the times of carts and buggies, when wheels were made of wood.
Images from the city’s Municipal Archives hint at snow removal methods of the past, showing a horse-drawn plow, a wagon dumping snow into the river and a man in a derby demonstrating a “snow removal machine.”
This time around, City Hall is bringing a new technological twist to snow removal, with a real-time tracker allowing New Yorkers to see where Sanitation has dispatched plows in your area.
At a press conference Friday morning, Mayor Michael Bloomberg detailed the Sanitation Department’s modern plans to deal with snowy streets, saying it is poised to deploy 1,700 snowplows and 65 front-end loaders, joining the 450 salt spreaders already out on the streets. Sanitation workers have been fully mobilized since Thursday, working 12-hour shifts.
“This morning, I visited Sanitation Department crews who are on snow-removal duty,” he said. “The winter storm is certainly on everyone’s minds, and I can tell you that there were a lot of plows on the front of trucks, there was a big snow melter ready to go if necessary.”
In Nagle’s words: “This will be a full battle mode.”
It could prove to be an intense weekend for those workers. Nagle has spent a lot of time around snowplow drivers — and got behind the wheel of one herself — for a book, set to be released next month, about the work of the city Department of Sanitation.
She notes some unique hazards of snow duty. Plowing drifts continuously can induce a hypnotic effect, she said, occasionally luring drivers to zone out completely. And unevenness in the pavement can separate the bottom of a plow from the top with hardly any notice, causing a “seriously violent” noise that sounds like a gun going off next to your head, she said.
The upside, of course, is that the clamor can wake drivers from their hypnosis.
