Facing a mountain of frozen, packed precipitation, the New Haven Department of Public Works called for backup, in the form of a 19,000-pound, snow-melting truck.
“This is a pilot effort,” said DPW Deputy Director Howard Weissberg as he watched the truck in action Thursday night in the department parking lot on Middletown Avenue. “We’ll see how it works and then go from there.”
Weissberg’s crew spent Thursday night into the wee hours of Friday morning experimenting with a new way to get rid of this winter’s unwelcome surprise guest — eviscerating it en masse, with an ice-melting truck.
New Haven, like much of the rest of New England, has been dealt record temperatures and snowfall, making transportation difficult in neighborhoods around the city. One solution: collecting snow from streets, and dumping it in the parking lot of the DPW, among other spots in town.
But what to do about the frozen mountain of snow?
Weissberg received a proposal from Tarantino Landscapes: they offered to melt the problem away. City traffic chief Jim Travers got wind of the proposal, said Weissberg, and pushed for it.
“Until now, we’d only done private and commercial snow melting,” said Gino Tarantino, President of Tarantino Landscape, the Bridgeport based company that supplied the ice melting truck. “This is our first season doing this, and this is the first city we’re serving.”
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The snow melting machine works at a rate of 60 tons per hour, turning snow into water. Snow is dumped into the back of the truck, melted with a 1000-gallon bath of hot water, and discharged into the sewer system. And apparently it emerges cleaner: it’s passed through a filter before being released. The truck works off of 800 gallons of diesel fuel.
“Right now, we’re the only company in Connecticut providing this service,” said Tarantino.
He said the quote for melting the mountain of snow for New Haven was just under $10,000.
The melting began at 7:30 Thursday night. In the meantime, city officials Travers and DPW chief John Prokop were being grilled at City Hall over New Haven’s response to snow.
Weissberg, hanging out with the snow melting crew, said the process would probably go on until about 5 a.m. He said he would stick around til about 1 a.m. “I think we’ll take it in shifts.”