Well what a difference a year makes.
While public works crews have been busy trying to keep up with the snow the past few weeks, the crews responsible for maintaining the water mains have had an extremely quiet winter.
Chris Mayne, the Vice Chair of Public Works and Engineering says the mild winter had a lot to do with that.
“Yes, and the easy comparison is that last year around this time the city had a record breaking, almost 400 frozen water lines reported to the city which was such a huge number. But it was such a long, cold, deep frost, that’s what caused the problems,” Mayne recalled.
“Right now as of March the 8th, there are literally two reports of frozen water lines, one on private property and one on city property this winter, so from 400 to two, that’s a huge indicator how mild and how shallow the frost has been this year.”
Mayne adds the public works crews have now completely changed their mandate due to the recent weather change.
“A week ago we finished 10 days of two back to back storms. City crews were having a hard time keeping up and now not even a week later the calls at city hall have kind of changed to puddles, clogged storm drains, too much water in the streets and it’s interesting in the course of a week it’s gone from winter maintenance to spring drainage problems,” said Mayne.
A quiet broken water main season has definitely helped the city coffers, but Mayne believes it still too early to tell if it will continue that way throughout 2016.
“There probably hasn’t been as much overtime and additional contracting called in this year compared to last year,” said Mayne.
“It is definitely too early to say if there will there be any over the year budget savings, we still have to get to the end of March. Things can change on a dime and next November and December is still part of this year’s budget season and at this point who knows, it could be eight weeks of green grass or we could have a snow storm in November and just keep going for six weeks.”