Outdoor Power Equipment (Lawn Mowers, Snow Blowers, Chain Saws and more) Discussions

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpxQPPIKdy4

When I was younger and worked for a local county public works department we utilized these machines to pick up excess road shoulder debris that was brought from shoulder onto the fog line area using a road grader. It worked well picking up the sod, dirt and rocks that this entailed.

That's what I thought too.  That machine wasn't specifically designed for snow removal duty, just like that Deere grader shown in the video.

I've seen the same type of thing although typically they don't discharge to the side. Instead the dump truck either moves forward or even backward, following the "super duper snow scooper". I've even seen it used with a snow melting machine, which is essentially a large device to throw money away with.

Yes, I've seen those snow melter trucks too.  It probably takes quite a lot of fuel to turn snow to water, but probably a lot less fuel than having an army of dump trucks to haul it away and empty coming back.

Snow removal isn't cheap.  Got to do what you got to do.  There's a lot of revenue lost if people can't get around.

Yep, I've seen these a bit further up North in the area where I used to live. They have to remove the snow because there won't be any where for the snow to go for the next storm. I think they also do this in Canada but I'm sure our neighbors to the North will chime in. Cool video, thanks for posting it.

Quiet afternoon here, so I did a little research. This appears to be an Athey forcefeed loader. Athey went bankrupt in 2001, and Leeboy purchased it; from the Leeboy site (leeboy.com) "While you may know the force feed loader by its Athey name, LeeBoy has greatly enhanced the loader’s design to excel at continuous high-capacity material loading since purchasing the Athey product in 2001." There's even a brochure: http://www.leeboy.com/uploadedFiles/10166_LB_Brochure_3000_FF_Loader.pdf Spec sheet says it'll do 20 cu yds (15 cu meters) per minute of windrowed snow. I say it's a bit too large for my driveway. Dang, it would have been fun.

Steve_Cebu wrote:
Yup, that's exactly correct up here in the Montreal area. In a regular winter they take it away after every snowfall. You'll also be happy to know that they stopped dumping it directly into the St. Lawrence river a few years ago. now they truck it to a designated area, where they re-blow it into small mountain size piles (depending on the amount of snow that falls) and wait for it to melt. Because of the cost of doing this, some will cities actually blow it onto your lawn instead of trucking it away. 

I had forgot the brand until you posted this. Yeah they were Athey branded. I worked around them back in the very early 90's. Bill_H wrote:

GtWtNorth wrote:

Montreal and Quebec City really know how to remove snow. They move the parking meters back to the edge of the buildings and really clean the streets. I used to live in Guild NH and they'd also dump it directly into a nearby river but stopped a long time back because of enviromental issues. I think now they move it into designated areas here as well. They can't blow it onto my lawn now tho. Up at the road it's all trees. LOL

The most impressive snow removal activity was in Nagano, Japan.  A bit overkill for amount of equipment they used, but impressive.