Kelowna city crews have begun cleaning up winter's mess

Photo: Castanet/file

The City of Kelowna has begun the long process of removing sand and dirt from city streets.

Roadways operations supervisor Steve Bryans says crews began street sweeping on a limited basis about two weeks ago.

"Right now, we have five sweepers out during the day," said Bryans, who indicated it's still too cold to run the sweepers at night.

"They are picking up bike paths right now. Most of the stuff ends up migrating to the bike paths, regardless."

With the sheer volume of sand, Bryans says sweepers will have to make more than one pass of the bike paths to get them completely clear.

"We also have four sidewalk sweepers out, too," he said.

"We typically send them out ahead of the street sweepers to clean off the sidewalks into the bike paths or boulevards, then we pick it up."

Bryans says the city will add three of four more sweepers closer to the middle of the month.

If you've notice more sand on the roads than normal, you wouldn't be wrong.

"It's because the winter we had was colder than normal, so we used a lot more sand than salt," he says.

"Anything below -6 C, typically you'll use sand or sand and salt mixed. But, some of those temperatures below 10 or 20 below, it would just be sand. So, we used a lot more sand."

With only a slight chance of flurries in the forecast this weekend, the city likely won't have a need to bring the plows out again until next winter.

Bryans says the city spent between $1.2 million and $1.3 million on snow removal over the winter season.

About $1 million of that was spent during the first two months of 2020.