City Crews Working Overtime to Move, Remove Record Breaking Snow

ST. CLOUD -- Our record breaking snow this month has kept snowplow drivers and street crews very busy. St. Cloud Maintenance Supervisor Tom Zabinski says his staff has already put in over 1,800 hours of overtime in February.

He says, with all the snow we've gotten, the streets are getting more narrow.

We're telling staff we need to plow the streets as wide as we possibly can because with the high banks we're losing some of the width in the streets.  With the snow being as high as they are unfortunately sometimes the snow stays on the plow until it finds an open spot.

That open spot is usually your driveway.

Zabinksi says St. Cloud city crews are responsible for clearing 762 lanes miles of roadway along with another 42 miles of alleys.

Zabinski says all the snow has to be loaded up and hauled out of the downtown. He says they bring it to their maintenance facility where they have a nine-acre paved lot.

It's stacked probably 18 to 20 feet tall. We need to stack it just to maintain enough area to store it.  The area is getting quite filled up already.

Zabinski says he's expecting that huge snow pile probably won't fully melt until sometime in May.

St. Cloud has 212 miles of sidewalk, with much of that having to be cleared by city staff.