Cambridge is quiet at 10:30 on Thursday night, except at the lot next to the Cambridge Department of Public Works (DPW) facility on Mooney St. A steady stream of dump trucks carry full loads of snow into the lot, swing around, back up to a mound of snow that runs about the length of a football field and more than 20 feet high in places, dump their cargo, and head back out for more. Front loaders lumber in and start lifting snow from the base of the mound for an excavator to pick up and build the hill higher. The crew will be doing this until 6 a.m. on what is the last overnight snow removal in the wake of the blizzard that hit Greater Boston with as much as 30 inches of snow on Feb. 22 and 23.
This is what it takes to build a snow farm. The city’s head snow farmer (not his real job) is T.J. Shea, superintendent of streets (real job). Shea has been working multiple shifts since the snow started falling on Sunday. First it was clearing snow, now it is “harvesting” snow from the streets and transporting it to this snow farm or an even larger one behind the DoubleTree Hotel in Brighton.
Despite the grueling hours, Shea, 47, doesn’t dread the snow. “I do like snow,” he said. “I think I liked it a lot more when I was younger, but I still do like it. It’s definitely not as fun, but, you know, everyone loves snow and I find it peaceful when it’s snowing.”
Snow farming, however, is not peaceful. Too much heavy equipment involved, with their reverse alarms blaring every time something backs up.
It is heavy-duty work. About 180 city employees are involved in clearing snow. The DPW prioritizes the major city arteries — the ones with parking bans during snow emergencies — as well as the city’s 17 schools, city offices and buildings, crosswalks, and bus stops that don’t include shelters (those are the MBTA’s responsibility).
Tonight, there are 17 crews out and around Cambridge, including some 80 trucks. The crew we’re watching is clearing snow off Concord Avenue between the Fresh Pond rotary and up onto Garden Street into Harvard Square. As we watch what’s happening on Concord, what would usually be a trickle of late-night cars and transit buses has become a clog, waiting while the crews clean snow out of a bus stop across the street from the Tobin Montessori and Darby Vassal Upper School.
The crews are a mix of contractors and the roughly 180 DPW employees. The city workers have been rotating double shifts, working regular jobs such as collecting trash or building maintenance, from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m., going home and then returning by 9 p.m. to start the serious work of harvesting snow.
A little before midnight, Shea’s radio crackles. It’s not good news — one of the crews that’s out clearing snow has had a mishap with a light pole. Shea is stoic; he says he’ll file a police report and let the city solicitor know.
The city’s usual secondary snow farm is at Danehy Park. This is the first year it’s been able to use the Mooney Street lot, which is owned by Healthpeak, a company planning a significant development here in the Alewife Quadrangle. This lot is much easier for trucks to access than Danehy, and, unlike Danehy, it’s removed from residential neighborhoods.
“It’s out of the way and in Cambridge, that’s pretty challenging,” Shea said. “We were fortunate, very fortunate to get this Mooney Street property.”
At the lot, one of the front loaders is being driven by DPW worker Steve Travers, 34. He said he got up at 4:30 this morning to commute in from his home in Methuen, worked his day shift, and will work through the night before going back home to get some rest.
In a brief lull between trucks, Travers jokes that when the snow farm work is finished, they should put a DPW flag on top of it, to claim the mountain.
Workers keep up a running conversation about when the snow farm will melt away. Travers says he thinks it would be August if the city weren’t to manage the pile, but more likely sometime in July. This winter so far, the city has had about 60 inches of snow, nowhere near the 110-inches in 2014-2015 but more snow accumulation in a single winter than it has had since 2018. Shea’s guess is June 20.
The cost for a single night of snow removal — between paying for overtime wages, contractors, the equipment — is about $250,000.
During the day, Shea is looking forward, making sure the city is ready for the next snowfall. He has to talk to his “brew master,” the city employee who mixes the brine that will be sprayed on the streets and bike lanes ahead of salting. “You salt on dry asphalt, you lose a third of it onto the sides on the road,” Shea said. The city can store 15,000 gallons of the special liquid and use up most of that in a storm the size of last weekend’s on the 200 miles of city streets it clears. Its salt barn off Sherman Street is more than half empty in the wake of the storm.
There are also resident concerns to address. “We have gotten a lot of complaints this past storm through emails, through phone calls through the main office, and they have been shared with us,” Shea said. The noise can spark outrage on social media sites and sometimes it’s more personal: “We get some friendly gestures,” Shea said, of people’s reactions.
But there’s also one he wants to make sure his staff hear: one email came in saying “Thank you, public works. We understand how hard you guys are working.”
Shea said, “It’s nice to get those because you don’t get that too often.”
A stronger
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