Over 2.1m tonnes of snow removed from Kazan streets this winter
The winter street clearing campaign ended in Kazan, and the city has record-high results. The precipitation within three months is 180mm, which is 35% above the average. The Tatarstan capital is second in a rating of the most snowy Russian cities.
Snow removal became a real challenge for road services. Due to this, an urban winter road network maintenance programme is going to be updated. Deputy head of the chairman of the urban Executive Committee Igor Kulyazhev said Kazan addressed the Russian Road Research and Development Institute for consultation.
January was especially snowy. Precipitation in Kazan from 17 to 22 January was 49mm, this is 106% of the monthly average. Over a thousand special machinery and more than 750 road workers were deployed in early February in the city, their shifts lasted for 14-16 hours. However, even this turned out to be insufficient. Additional resources of urban enterprises and organisations were involved — above 600 pieces of machinery.
Kazan is developing its own fleet of machinery to provide effective maintenance of the road network in winter. A total of 21 pieces of equipment were purchased additionally as early as January.
The urban authorities set the task of updating the urban winter road network maintenance programme developed in 2011.
Eight snow melting stations operated in the capital of Tatarstan. But even considering the opening of the new facilities, all stations functioned exceeding the installed capacity. They received up to 14,000 tonnes of snow a day instead of 8,000 tonnes. Over a million tonnes of snow was removed to the stations. 12 temporary storage facilities were arranged in different districts of Kazan too.
More than 63,000 deicing materials were used in winter. Kazan applied a two-phase reagent and a sand and salt mix for road deicing and tested grits for pedestrian areas in central streets. “We positively assessed the effect of the use, we will consider the possibility of using such a reagent in big volumes,” the vice head of the chairman of the Executive Committee commented.