Snow blown onto front lawn angers Aberdeen Ave. homeowner

Caroline Gillespie of Aberdeen Avenue was angered after assessing damage done in the front yard of her family's home, where large snow banks were piled by Public Works crews.

According to Gillespie, the workers blew the snow without regard for a pair of young trees, which were buried up to their branches. They also may have damaged sets of Christmas lights, which were blown out of the branches and left dangling.

"The trees are a wreck," she told the Examiner. "I stood out there and asked them not to do it and they went right ahead." After contacting Director General Bruce St. Louis, Gillespie says he told her someone from the City would go to her home in the spring after the snow melted to evaluate the loss.

Gillespie doesn't believe the City was faced with an emergency situation. "It wasn't," she said. "They just ran out of steam. I mean, they could have left that snow there. There was no more snow coming."

Gillespie also complained that snow removal personnel cleaned the eastern part of Aberdeen thoroughly, but not her side of the street. In addition, she does not agree with the list of streets chosen by the City for snowblowing onto private properties. "If they're going to do this, they have to rotate it," she said.

"They've picked designated streets and they're just dumping it on those streets … They could have cleaned our side which has parking and left the other side uncleared. They took the snow away on the other side the day before and then they left all the snow on our side and blew it up on Friday.

"But the other side was absolutely pristine clean on Thursday, where there's no parking. Now what sense does that make?" Gillespie said she may bring the problem to city council's next public meeting, which is taking place at 8 p.m. on March 31.

"When you look at the magnitude of the problem that we had, and the fact that for Monday and Tuesday (last week), which were the two heaviest loading days, we had virtually no access to the dumps, we had to get that snow out of there, " St. Louis said in an interview this past Monday.

He said Public Works has been "casting" snow only on streets where the homes have large front lawns. "Believe me, we do not do this as a practice. We do this when we have to clear the streets and make them safe." St. Louis said most of the properties in question are north of Sherbrooke Street. "But even then, we only did it where we absolutely had to.

"I consider this an emergency situation that we had," he added. "Yes, there was extra snow on the front lawns." But at the same time, he noted, citing two recent house fires that occurred immediately after heavy snowfalls that, "I'm glad we had both sides cleared."