JOSE RODRIGUEZ

Welcome back to another episode of Calgary Conversations. And today we're going to talk about the hot topics in the cold weather. We're lucky to have with us today, Chris Hewitt, who is our manager of mobility maintenance here at The City.

And we're going to talk about roads. So, Chris, what do you do with The City?

CHRIS HEWITT

Okay. Well, I'm part of the team on Mobility Maintenance. What we do is run a lot of the bigger programs that happen on the road. So, the Snow and Ice Control Program in the winter, we sweep the streets in the spring, we repair potholes in the summer. It's all that stuff that's happening on the road surface, we look after.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ

So, in Calgary, we're used to going to bed and it's plus five degrees, and we wake up in the morning and there's a foot of snow on the driveway. What is your team doing at this time?

CHRIS HEWITT

Well, I would say that our team has been doing things already for a few days, right? Well ahead of when the snow comes, we're checking forecasts, we're getting our equipment ready. We're making sure our staffing levels are appropriate, so that when it does come – we're ready for it.

That night before the snow started, we were probably out putting some material down on some of the spots we were aware of, you know, hills and bridge decks, to make it a little easier to clear once the snow starts.

And I hope that if you wake up with a foot of snow, we've probably been working for 12 or 14 hours already trying to keep it off the major roads.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ

A foot of snow on the driveway, not a foot of snow on the road is the goal. Nice.

CHRIS HEWITT

I sure hope not.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ

You talked about some of the material that you're putting down, and we always hear words like, pickle, and brine. Can you tell us what goes on to Calgary's roads and when? Because it's temperature dependent, right?

CHRIS HEWITT

Yeah, sure, let’s start with liquids. So, liquids we’ll often put down ahead of a snow event happening. What those are doing, they're getting the road ready for the snow, making it a little bit harder for the ice and snow to bond to the road.

So, there we would use brine, which is a salt mix — basically salt and water. We'll use that down to about minus 10 or 12. And that's a road temperature. So, we'll be putting that on a lot of our major roads, a lot of our bus routes, bridge decks, some of the hillier areas of the city, just to help there when the snow does start.

If we're really, really cold, we'll use calcium chloride. That's a mix of calcium, salt, water. Good down to a much lower temperature. And then, downtown, we actually use beet brine. So that's a lower sodium content liquid that we can put on the roads and, you know, same effect. Keeps the road and keeps the snow nice from bonding to the road.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ

So, when I'm not living the luxurious life of a podcast host, I'm the media relations guy. So, I see a lot of inquiries come in every year about beet brine, and it is actually made from beets. Can you tell us a little bit about what that is?

CHRIS HEWITT

It is, I mean that's really all there is to it. Extract, you know, beet extract. And it's a much lower salt content than using regular salt brine, much less environmental impact than calcium chloride or salt brine. And so, quite effective in our downtown core. And so, we've been using that for a few years down there.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ

So, the streets are painted red downtown?

CHRIS HEWITT

More of a sweet looking brown but yes you can tell if you see it.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ

A sweet looking brown, hey? Now, how many pieces of equipment do we have out on the roads when there's a snowfall?

CHRIS HEWITT

So, we have a pretty large fleet of in-house equipment. We have over 100 sanders, so that's your typical snowplow, what a person thinks of when you talk about a snowplow. We have got about 30 graders. We've got over 20 pieces of smaller sort of two-ton trucks with a plow. We're using those right now on a bit of a trial. We have lots of pieces of small equipment – bobcats, skid steers, things that are doing pathways or over bridges – then we have a number of loaders, which we can attach with snowblowers if we need to. Otherwise, they're keeping our trucks full of — whether it's pickle or salt, depending on temperature — they're what keep our trucks full of what they need to put out on the roads.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ

Well, it's like an orchestra. All these sorts of parts have to connect together to make it work, right?

CHRIS HEWITT

Yeah.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ

Can you tell us, I think we named some of our snow plows a little while back, right? Do you have a favourite?

CHRIS HEWITT

I'm an old soul when it comes to music. So, I think Meltin’ John is one of my favourites. Sweet Child O’Brine, that’s another one really good one I heard.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ

Love it!

CHRIS HEWITT

So yeah, some music ones, but lots of fun ones.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ

So, it's funny that you mention that because I was thinking about this and I have a bunch of friends who love Darth Blader.

And I was never really a Star Wars kid. I know it's awful to say, and I'm admitting it here. It's awful to say, but I have a soft spot for Sled Zeppelin and Blizzard of Oz. Those are my two favourite. They just speak to me.

CHRIS HEWITT

Yeah, right.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ

The Forest Lawn metal-head just comes out of me when I see those plow names.

CHRIS HEWITT

Yeah, there's a lot of good ones. And that was really fun, right? A lot of those — I mean, obviously you can tell that some of them weren't from kids — but most of those names came from schools. Submissions from schools, so kids were getting involved, learning a little bit about snowplows and naming them, so it’s great.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ

How many kilometres of roadway do we have in Calgary?

CHRIS HEWITT

So, we have just over 17,000 lane kilometers of road.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ

Wow. Now does that include the bike paths and walking paths and all that, or just the roads?

CHRIS HEWITT

No, that's just on roadway. If you're looking at pathways, we have about 1100 kilometres. Sidewalks are about 6000 kilometres of sidewalk in the city.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ

Wow.

CHRIS HEWITT

So, we have lots of inventory and look after.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ

Now, the city does not do sidewalks. I guess we would in some public places. How does that work?

CHRIS HEWITT

Yeah, so we have just under 6000 kilometres of sidewalk, all in. The city takes care of about 10 per cent of that, a little over 550 kilometres. So those are things around parks or around City buildings, where we're responsible. The majority of sidewalks are the responsibility of adjacent property owners in Calgary.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ

So, if I own that place, I need to shovel my sidewalk.

CHRIS HEWITT

That's right.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ

And I think that we've actually upped the fines for that, for not doing it, if I'm not mistaken?

CHRIS HEWITT

Yeah. I mean, so we have a fine structure for that, $250 and it can increase with subsequent sort of offenses in the same year. But really when you look at what's actually happening, if officers are going out to an area to speak about that, it's typically education and warnings, as people are compliant once that happens, which is great. Not very common that we resort to tickets.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ

Yeah, fair enough. And I think it is that, that education piece is always key for us as opposed to fining folks.

Windrows. I have to ask about windrows because when a plow comes, sometimes they leave, you know, the wake behind, and upsets some Calgarians. Maybe you can just talk to us a little bit about how all that happens and how we should deal with that?

CHRIS HEWITT

Sure. Well, you know, what I would say is, whenever a plow goes by, it leaves that wake, right? You're moving snow from the middle of the road, it's going to the side. So, we do create windrows when we're plowing, we know that we will.

What we have done with our most recent policy updates is that we are making a very focused effort, firstly, on reducing the size of windrows that we leave. So, a lot of training for our, our operators on pulling snow in certain situations and just minimizing the windrows that they're leaving at intersections or crosswalks.

But what we do, is once we've wrapped up sort of the work on our major roads and our snow plan, we get out and we do remove windrows at some of our key locations. And so, what those are for us, those are bus stops, crosswalks and wheelchair ramps. Areas where we're inhibiting sort of accessibility, people getting around by walking or wheeling or biking.

And so, we really make a focus of that. Now, formally in our program, we try to remove those a couple of times a year. We'll go and clear all the windrows around schools, try to keep that accessible so the busses can drop kids off a little easier. Parents can drop off and pick up kids a little easier.

So, you know, go back a number of years and there was really no attention paid to Windrows. And now we're really making the focus of trying to keep the city moving from an accessibility perspective.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ

One of the things that, often comes up is snow clearing versus snow removal. And I think I've heard you speak in the past about, how if we actually did get into the business of snow removal, it would come with a pretty hefty price tag, right?

CHRIS HEWITT

It would for sure, yeah, absolutely. When we ballpark removing snow versus plowing it, you're probably looking at 10 to 15 times the cost.

When we plow a road, we might use a snow plow, we might use a grader,  one or two pieces of equipment to get that road plowed. If we're removing snow, we're into sometimes 12, 15, 16 pieces of equipment to get that operation running smoothly. So, yeah, very big difference in cost. It's rare that we remove snow, although we do get into situations where we have to.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ

So, if I'm right, your yearly budget is about $55 million. That’s right?

CHRIS HEWITT

That's right.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ

And if we decided to do snow removal, if I'm just doing it ten times, it would be around $550 million?

CHRIS HEWITT

Probably not quite that because you wouldn't do snow removal in all situations, all the time right? That doesn't really make sense. But if you look at a city, like Montreal for example. So, they have a budget of about $180 million. They do snow removal in certain situations. Whenever, for example, in residential areas, if there's more than ten centimeters of snow, they're doing snow removal. They have 11 snow dump sites around their city, a budget of 180 million.

We have three snow dump sites. Now, further to that, with our 17,000 kilometers of road, they've got about 11. So, if you were to look at it that way, we'd probably be somewhere in the region of 250 to 260 million to provide that sort of Montreal level of snow service.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ

This is just a weather question. So, are Chinooks a good thing or a bad thing for you guys?

CHRIS HEWITT

They're both. They're good for the soul because we get some warmth. During the winter, they do melt snow if we have snow left over on the sides of the roads. And if we have a good Chinook, we can expect some of that to melt.

What that does for us is that means a little less focus on having to remove snow each event, because we know that if we're going to have some good weather coming, we'll create a little more room on the roads with that melt.

But they're a challenge, too. There's certainly a challenge if we have a number of Chinooks. We have all these freeze-thaw cycles, we're going above and below zero overnight or even during the day sometimes, we're going to have snow melt that's going to run across the road. It's going to freeze overnight. Same thing's going to happen on our pathways. And when you get to summer maintenance, we've had all this freeze-thaw, we've got all this water getting into the cracks in the road, freezing up. And so that's caused causing potholes, right? So, when you have a frequent freeze- thaw cycles in a city, it’s much more difficult on your roadway infrastructure.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ

Parking bans. I don't remember the last time we had one. So how do those work and why do we need them?

CHRIS HEWITT

So, the last time we had one was 2019. So, it's been about five years

JOSE RODRIGUEZ

That explains why I don't remember.

CHRIS HEWITT

Yeah. The way it works is we have signage along all of our— these are typical on our priority two roads kind of transit roads, the major roads through communities — where there are also houses going out to people parking. So, these are our parking ban routes. They have a sign in the little snowflake on the pole there.

The time we would call a snow parking ban is if we're having a lot of buildup of snow on the sides of those roads, and the roads are narrowing. And we don't really see any relief in sight. So, if we're going to have successive snow events or the weather is going to stay really cold, or we're going to have multiple snow events, we can get to a point where we just need to create space on the roads.

And so, what we do, we call a Snow Route parking ban and get everyone off the roads, and then it's going to be a mix of really aggressive plowing out to the sides, or even snow removal. You know, this is one of those situations where we would consider doing a bit of a larger snow removal operation around the city. Haven't had those conditions in the last few years where it's built up to the point that, you know, safety was an issue where roads were narrowing.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ

In the last few years have we had more snow, less snow? We’ve had concentrated dumps and then some nice weather, which gave us a break. What's it been like and what's it going to be like this year?

CHRIS HEWITT

I would say that over the last year, we have been seeing quite a lot of concentrated and large events, you know, 25cm plus. For example, just a few weeks ago, we had about 35cm of snow. That's quite a lot to get in Calgary at one time.

If you look at averages, we're typically going to be in the region of 140 to 180cm of snow over a year. 2023 was light, it didn't have a lot of snow. And again, the budget sort of reflected that. But this year, 2024 from January to May — so that first month of 2024 — we had about 165cm of snow. So, we had almost a full year snow in the first half of 2024.

And then you look at the second half of the season, which is October, December, September through December, we've had somewhere in the region of 45 or 50, I would say, all in over about three or four storms. And so, I think we're going to be well over 200cm this year.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ

So, it's an above average year?

CHRIS HEWITT

‘24 has certainly been an above average area.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ

Wow. And so how does that work then? If you have a set budget, and you cannot control the weather, so you don't know how much usage will happen with your work. What happens to that money then if we go over, how is it funded? If we go under, where does it go?

CHRIS HEWITT

So, a number of years back — in 2012 I think it was – we introduced the Snow and Ice Control Reserve. At the time it was capped at $15 million. And what we were doing, was if we would have a lighter winter and we would have budget left over, we would put it in the reserve. On years where we had a heavier snowfall, we needed to drop and withdraw from the reserve. And that has been an extremely effective tool. And what I would say is, when you're looking at a reserve, if you have a reserve that's always empty, it's obviously not doing what it needs to do. If you have a reserve, it's always full. Maybe you don't need that reserve. But over the ten years we've had this known as control reserve. It's, you know, it really has looked like this. It's been full. It's been empty. And so really effective tool at saving money when we've had those slightly milder winters and helping us with some extra budget when needed on the busier winters.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ

So, potholes are always a hot topic with Calgarians. I know we received a report, say, a couple months ago about the state of our roads. And as a result of that, we're sort of doing an undertaking to really go at them.

Can you speak a little bit about our attack on potholes come spring?

CHRIS HEWITT

Yeah. So, what I would say, not to put myself out of work, but the best, the best way to attack potholes is not filling bottles. It's repairing roads. It’s asset management and it's repairing roads in a timely way when they need it, and then you don't see the potholes forming.

So that report spoke about the overall quality of The City's roads. You know, it has come down over the last decade or so. And so, what we've what we've identified is some funding, what we would need in order to get the roads to a place where the potholes are lessened, right? And our overall quality is sort of where we want it to be.

So, excellent. That was a great report. That was one of my colleagues who put that together. They do the asset management of our roadways. And Council responded great to that report. Through the budget cycle, we've received some extra funding for road repair work. I think people are really starting to pay attention to the condition of assets and the sort of life cycle budget requirements to keep our assets in good condition.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ

I noticed recently that we have a new machine that's sort of goes over top of the potholes and zaps them like magic. And then it's fixed, and you move on to the next one. Would you tell us a little bit about that?

CHRIS HEWITT

Yeah, it's a great new tool. And zapping and is pretty close to correct. So, basically what that is, it's an infrared heater. We have a panel about four by eight feet on the bottom of it – heats up really hot. What you do is you put it over the road, it heats the road, and will basically heat the road to the point where you can rake the asphalt on the road or re-shovel it. —almost brings it to new. And we'll add a little bit of oil to that just to make sure it's in good condition — the road and the asphalt, that is. And then we fix the surface. So good for a number of things, right? It can work on potholes. It can work on sections of the road that have cracked, which are otherwise quite difficult to fix. So this, we'll leave it over the top of the road for a few minutes, heats it right up, and you can do your repair.

One of the real benefits of this tool is that it really reduces the seams we have when we're making these repairs with a typical pothole. You know, you're cleaning out a pothole, filling it, but you will have those edges around where eventually water is going to get back in there. You know, we put a sealant in, but invariably water will get back in there eventually and cause sort of recurrence. Where with this infrared heater, the whole area is sort of reconstituted, so you don't have those seams. So, what we're hoping to see is much longer-lasting repairs. So, we'll be visiting those locations over the next months and years to see how they're holding up.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ

So that infrared machine, in the pictures I've seen, it's not very big. So, I'm assuming the usage for it is very limited to say residential streets? Or can it be used on some of our bigger roadways? How is it used?

CHRIS HEWITT

Yeah, so at the moment, you're right. I mean we can do successive areas with it. But you know, the heater itself – let's say it’s four by eight feet or so – typically more localized things, but you'd be able to do an intersection over say an hour. You could do four or five areas of that size. So you can do some pretty large work with it.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ

So, the snow has just fallen. The countdown is on. How long does it take you folks to clear stuff?

CHRIS HEWITT

After the snow stops falling, that's when our clock starts. We have a seven day plan. So, what we are looking to do right now is we are aiming to have our priority one roads, so those are the big ones – that's Glenmore, Crowchild, 16^th Ave. — we want them cleared within 18 hours of the snow stopping. And before the snow stops, we've been primarily focusing on those roads, trying to keep them moving. The next part of our network that we're looking to do with priority two roads – so these are the major roads through communities, the bus routes – those are cleared in the next 18 hours. So, within 36 hours, we're looking to have all of those major roads clear. Once we've done that, our plan shifts. We get into our residential areas, as well as doing a lot of the accessibility enhancing work. So, we're moving windrows and crosswalks and working with the roads from bus stops. So really, that's what our plan looks like. Now, with the recent policy that was approved by Council — while not part of the policy — one of the things we've committed to doing and Council has supported, is that we'd like to be doing our priority one and our priority two roads concurrently. We'd like to have it all done within 24 hours. And so we're working towards that right now. We have some trials and we have some equipment enhancements that we're looking at to make that happen going forward.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ

So, in short, more roads done more quickly, more roads done more quickly?

CHRIS HEWITT

Right, more roads done more quickly. Help people get around on those community roads, make life easier for transit. And that's the roads they're using the most. And so, we are looking at bringing forward our service times on those roads. Doing them, like I said, concurrently with our major priority one roads.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ

Well, Chris, it's been fascinating speaking with you. Is there anything I've forgotten to ask you that you'd like to share?

CHRIS HEWITT

Well, I always like to give a plug to our crews, our staff. They're out there. They are working hard all the time, in particular when it's snowing. 24 hours a day they're going trying to keep things safe for everyone. So, you know, one thing we always say is they're out there working in less-than-ideal conditions, obviously, to keep everyone safe. So, give them lots of room to work to keep them safe while they're doing it. But really, nothing happens without them. And they're very much experts in this.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ

Thanks, Chris. And your team is the meat and potatoes of the city. Very important for safety and for transport and this city does not operate without you folks. So, thank you very much for everything that you do.

CHRIS HEWITT

Thank you so much.