Downtown GB makes room for new snow

GREEN BAY - While driving to work at Bosse's News and Tobacco, Ray Bares was surprised to see something was missing.

“The first thing when I came into the downtown area I noticed the snow is gone,” said Bares.

Bares never saw the snow removed, because it happened when most people were sleeping.

“Less traffic and all that snow will be pushed to the center of the road and graded into windrow and the trucks will be hauling it all away,” said Tim Gates, a supervisor for Green Bay’s public works department.

The downtown snow removal operation started at 11 o'clock Wednesday night and lasted until daylight Thursday morning. It's a process city workers say can't be done during the day.

“Very impossible because we can't shut down streets during the day,” said Gates.

When the city does the removal operation, they focus on streets where there are a lot of sequences of street, curb, sidewalk, building because there isn't much room to keep piling snow.

“That's our biggest challenge is when we get a lot of snow, what do we do,” said Chris Pirlot, the operations director for public works.

“It's basically the downtown anywhere from Monroe to Washington, from Main Street to Doty,” said Gates.

Special blowers are brought downtown for the operation. Trucks haul the snow away to the city's west side dump site.

“We like to do it when we do get the time and it's starting to add up and we just would like to get this with this upcoming snow that is coming,” said Gates.

Bares says he is happy to see the snow gone, even if Winter Storm Felecia is already about to replace it.

“But it'll be fresh so we can push it out of the way to get our customers spots to get in there,” said Bares.

This was the first time this winter the snow process removal was done in the downtown area.