Post-Snow Removal

Sorry about the blurriness, night shoots are always tricky and you are lucky to get any rendering whatsoever. I always wanted a picture of this. The city removing the mountains of snow, although to still call these gray mounds snow is really to use the term broadly, they’re now a mix of salt and grit and dirt, softened by sun to near melting then frozen again come night. Gross slush is more accurate. The city gets the back hoe and several dump trucks and scoops it up and dumps it into a vacant lot. The eve before yet another snow storm so I guess they were getting ready. For some reason I recall years and years ago them dumping the snow into the river down by Exchange but the city worker here swore that was never the case, not in his 30 years on the J.C. job, environmental hazard—all the salt that is used to melt the ice to clear our streets is not the same saline in the seven seas. It all drains into the river eventually, well into the ocean, along with the river water, but if it eventually washes away through the sewer system at least there is some treatment involved before it reaches the Atlantic. Winter is only a month old, and you know, we have had a lot of snow, and they remove these mounds—which originally fell on December 26th—to make room for the more snow that was predicted to begin come daylight. The cops had the street closed off, this is Columbus as the workers and vehicles did their thing. I watched for bit, the way the tamped down the snow before scooping it up, as systematic as they could be when it comes to this sort of thing.