Harvard and Cambridge Strike Balance in Clearing Square of Snow

UPDATED: Feb. 14, 2013, at 12:55 a.m.

For John F. Nardone, Cambridge's deputy commissioner for public works, winter is a busy season.

“There’s a bunch of us here that deal with snow, and at this time of year it’s constant,” Nardone said. “We’re always thinking about what’s the next storm.”

With about 34 inches of snow so far this year, including about four inches that fell on Thursday, both Cambridge and Harvard have had their hands, and shovels, full, keeping the streets and sidewalks of Harvard Square clear.

For the city, the number of inches forecast for each storm determines the type of resources deployed,

“With something like a two-inch storm or even storms less than that, where you get a coating or you get a little bit, we’re doing that strictly in-house, and we keep that to what we call a salting operation,” Nardone said.

This mild response calls for about 30 city employees and 15 pieces of city-owned equipment, he said, which keeps costs fairly low. However, once Nardone has to rely on contractors, that price tag goes up exponentially.

“Four inches is probably borderline for us, but really four to six inches, now we’re getting into contractors,” Nardone said. “Say we had ten events over this past season, maybe five or six of those we had to bring contractors in.”

This fleet includes 60 vehicles, from pickup trucks to salters, that clear more than 400 lane miles, a measure calculated by multiplying the number of lanes with the number of miles in each lane. For each mile of lane, the fleet will drop between 300 and 500 lbs. of salt, Nardone said.

By George J Lok

Though he would not give specific salt totals or cost for a given season, Nardone said he uses up salt in a hurry.

“If you think of it in kind of bigger numbers, that’s maybe 60-100 tons every time we do a salting application,” he said.

For its part, Harvard relies on both in-house employees and equipment, as well as contractors, to get the job done.

“We manage a fleet of more than three dozen pieces of snow removal equipment and typically deploy more than 150 employees to clear snow across campus,” Michael D. Conner, the director for communications at Harvard Campus Services, wrote in an email to The Crimson.

“Anytime, we are on call,” said Gabriel Lima, an employee of the property services company UGL Limited the University employs.

Standing on the steps of Boylston Hall in the snow on Thursday, Limas, said that clearing snow on the University’s campus requires special care.

“We can’t use another device like a  loader device simply because these are historic buildings, and they don’t want to scratch them or anything,” Limas said, pointing down to his plastic shovel. The University does employ heavy machinery on other, more durable, parts of campus, though.

Although the Harvard and the city are separately responsible for managing vast amounts of property, there is some cooperation, Conner and Nardone say, as the two entities work round-the-clock to collectively clear an overlapping network of streets, parking lots, and paths.

“Campus Services also coordinates closely with the City of Cambridge to ensure abutting walkways, roads, and bus stops are clear and passable,” Conner wrote.

Although Harvard does not plow any Cambridge public roads or sidewalks, the University does offer to help store excess snow, according to Nardone.

“Harvard has definitely offered up spots, I know you have a lot of construction that’s going to happen over in Brighton, and there’s locations over there where they’ve certainly offered for us to put snow,” Nardone said.

Connor also declined to say how much the University spends annually on snow removal.

—Staff writer Ivan B. K. Levingston can be reached at Ivan.Levingston@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @IvanLevingston.