Snowhere to dump the white stuff

"We'll be getting in touch with them again at that time," Robert said. "Everyone has been very cooperative on this issue," he said.

According to Robert, the boroughs of Ile-Bizard/Ste. Geneviève and Lachine are the only two on the island of Montreal that were unable to fit all of the snow from December on their usual, authorized snow-dumping grounds.

"We were too full (at our regular dumping site). So we dumped the snow on our own future snow dump site," said borough mayor Richard Bélanger.

The remains of several piles of snow are tucked away behind a "no entrance sign" on a woody territory that belongs to the borough on Rue de l'Église. Bélanger said he hoped to make that territory Ile Bizard's official one for snow-dumping.

"We hadn't had this amount of snow in Montreal during December since December 1971," said Lachine mayor Claude Dauphin. "People were riding their ski-doos on St. Catherine Street back then," he said.

Dauphin said that leaving the extra snow on the borough's usual sites, Lachine's industrial park and two other areas, would have created environmental problems. "I would have done the same thing tomorrow if I had to," he explained, although he said that Lachine has now come up with a solution.

The Turcotte Yard, a territory that belongs to the Quebec Ministry of Transport, will be used as a temporary dumping ground for the extra snow, said Dauphin. The territory is on the 220 Highway, past Ville St. Pierre.



"Everything's going to be removed within two days," Dauphin said about the snow now piling up on two Lachine parking lots and a baseball field site in Lasalle Park. "Nobody's using those places now," he said, so the 48-hour wait would not be too unbearable.

According to Robert, piles of old snow on improperly equipped dumping sites are environmental hazards, due to car pollutant and corrosive salt residues. "In this case, the problem wasn't too urgent since there was so much snow in December that those pollutants would be diluted," he said.

Seventy-two centimetres of snow fell on Montreal Island in December 2007, according to Environment Canada.