This year's snowfall events have put a fair amount of pressure on municipal personnel and equipment as they work to keep our local roads and streets open.

Altona CAO Dan Gagne says the heavy snowfall and the timing of these weather events during the December holiday period forced them to come up with a different approach to clearing streets this season.

"Because we've had so much snow this winter, rather than doing the best cleanup job we could in a short period of time, we had to extend that period of time in order to accelerate everybody's mobility around town," said Gagne.

That strategy meant clearing at least one lane for motorists to drive through on residential streets so that residents could get out and about, while at the same time, giving crews a little more time to deal with the overabundance of snow.

Altona has received close to 75 centimetres of snow this winter, which is an incredible amount for a season that officially began less than a month ago.

Gagne points out that while residents are mostly concerned about the 34 kilometres of streets being cleared in town, he reminds us that town crews also have to remove snow from a variety of parking lots including locations like the Civic Centre, Millennium Exhibition Centre, the fire department and other important infrastructure access points. Add to that all of our sidewalks and walking trails, and the job of snow removal becomes a monumental task for the town's half-dozen public works staff.

"There's always some displeasure expressed to us about not removing the snow quickly enough, but that's just a function of the job," said Gagne. "The majority of people are reasonable and understand that there are challenges that we have to overcome with our infrastructure, our equipment, with the number of personnel we have and the timing and severity of the snow storms that have hit our community. All of these things can combine to make things difficult."

The situation has not been much easier for neighbouring communities like Rhineland Municipality, Gretna, and Plum Coulee, according to Mike Rempel, CAO for Rhineland. The municipality uses four graders and a truck plow to open up about 400 miles of roads, which can take some time to finish.

"It can vary from half to three-quarters of a day, and sometimes up to two days to get roads cleared, depending on the amount of snow that has fallen and the size of the the drifts," said Rempel.

Rhineland, like most rural municipalities, won't send crews out until the storm has passed, that way they're not opening up the same roads hours later because the wind and snow blew them shut again.

"That wouldn't be an effective use of our resources which is why we wait until the wind dies down," said Rempel.

As for Rhineland's snow removal budget, Rempel says they blew that away after the first storm in early December.

"In the rural area, we're about $12,000 over, and that's not including the Boxing Day storm either. I expect that number will increase substantially once we take that into consideration."

Some of those over-budget costs are connected to the overtime that staff has accumulated in its efforts to get those roads cleared, with some employees working long 10 hour days while others working into the wee hours of the morning in a few of Rhineland's urban centres.