NORTHAMPTON — At a jarring 11 or 12 feet high, the snow mounds tower over the streets of downtown’s main drag, sometimes spilling into the road and — like a clogged artery — constrict two lanes of traffic into one.
Traffic congestion may be the least of your worries, however, when you’re trying to make a turn, and the mounds render your depth perception useless.
These mounds were the result of plows working to remove snow from the roads.
Last Thursday, this season’s largest winter storm, Niko, dumped up to 16 inches of snow in parts of western Massachusetts, like Belchertown, and up to 18 inches in the eastern part of the state, according to the National Weather Service, where meteorologists classified Niko a blizzard.
Schools were closed, storefronts were empty and the roadways were more like ice rinks. Before the snow, public works departments like those Amherst, Easthampton and Northampton were trying to trying to stay one step ahead of the ominous blue blob that consumed Doppler screens.
Richard Parasiliti Jr., who is Northampton’s highway superintendent, said he and his team are aware of the mountainous drifts downtown and have a plan to break them down.
“There’s enough traffic downtown without the piles,” Parasiliti said. Come Tuesday evening, he added, with the help of 25 dump trucks, crews will transfer the snow into the trucks and move it to less populated locations, like a former car lot on King Street.
Executing this process at night is crucial, Parasiliti said, because there’s virtually no activity.
“There’s less people, there’s less pedestrians,” he said. “There’s less of a chance of contact between the heavy machinery and (a person).”
It wasn’t always done that way. Before Parasiliti was at the helm of the highway division, he said crews would work during the day to break down the drifts. But following at least one busted windshield and a DPW truck backing over the front of another car, the process needed re-evaluating, he said.
“It’s more cost effective to do snow removal at night,” Parasiliti said. “Very little traffic to have to deal with. It’s also a lot safer to do this at night, and it’s more operationally efficient.”
To accomplish this, the DPW uses the 25 or so dump trucks and what are essentially industrial snow blowers. Typically, the public works crews don’t let the mounds sit for more than four days. Parasiliti noted that his team is slightly behind schedule this week, considering they’ve had to endure back-to-back heavy snowfalls.
“It’s hard to keep up with everything,” he added. “But eventually, every storm ends.”
The elephantine snow mounds, of course, are not special to Northampton’s downtown.
Easthampton Director of Public Works Joseph I. Pipczynski said his crew will work for the next two weeks to break down and transfer the snow banks in downtown that city’s downtown.
The challenge isn’t so much the process itself of removing the snow, but rather finding a place to put it. The number of options, he said, are shrinking thanks to development projects. The locations still available to serve as snow dumping grounds include the wastewater treatment plant on Ferry Street and behind the mills in the area of Pleasant Street, Pipczynski said.
“We’re getting squeezed as to where we can dump our snow because all this land is slowly disappearing on us,” he said.
There are ways residents can help, Pipczynski said. This includes keeping the sidewalks in front of homes and businesses clear as well as digging out fire hydrants. DPW workers can get to clearing downtown streets faster if they don’t have to do this type of work.
With more than 80 miles of road to maintain and keep clear, his department’s two-dozen or so snow plows, half of which are contractors, can only do so much, he said.
“We’re just asking people to be patient,” Pipczynski said. “We don’t have unlimited resources … We have to allocate them to the best of our ability.”
Amy Rusiecki, assistant superintendent of Amherst Public Works, said the city’s downtown streets don’t have the extra-wide road medians to store excess snow.
Unlike Northampton and Easthampton, there simply isn’t space.
“We instead have to put everything off the road,” she said, adding that the snow is sometimes placed in downtown parking lots as well as Cherry Hill, where it’s used for activities at the annual Winterfest.
The crew of Amherst workers also works to clear and transfer the snow piles at nighttime.
“We’ve got a giant snow blower, and they blow it into our dump trucks, and dump trucks take it to snow dump,” Rusiecki said. “They’re all municipal areas … there is no one set place we take it.”
With or without excessive snow mounds, Rusiecki advised residents to plan ahead and to take their time.
“We can’t be every single place at every single moment,” she said, “so plan accordingly.”
Note: This story has been revised to indicate that Northampton DPW workers used snow blowers to break down snow mounds rather than leaf blowers as originally stated.
Michael Majchrowicz can be reached at mmajchrowicz@gazettenet.com.