Slogging her way along the seven miles from her home in Newton to her office in Boston, Ozlem Ergun realized something. As an expert on debris, the condition of Boston looked familiar.
“What happened this time is very unusual for a snow event, in the sense that it just kept snowing and the temperatures went [below] melting point so we’re just not seeing any melting," said Ergun, an engineer whose research focuses on making systems work smoothly and efficiently. "So the snow event turned into something more similar to a debris event, where if the snow is not removed from the streets, the entire, kind of, the workings of the city have been paralyzed.”
A lot of Ergun's work has looked at humanitarian operations after natural disasters — including the big problem of debris removal. For example, she was involved in the 2010 Haiti earthquake, which created a huge amount of debris in Port au Prince.
Ergun moved to Boston from Georgia last fall to take a job as a professor at Northeastern, and she can’t believe what this winter in Boston has looked like.
“Even my kids are done with snow days, so that says a lot,” she said.
After a crisis like an earthquake, you have to pick up all the crushed cars, trees and rubble and clear it out — take it somewhere else. Ergun realized in some ways, dealing with a city full of snow-covered cars is actually trickier.
“In a debris situation after a natural disaster, if the cars are there, they’re already part of the debris, so you’re not really trying to be careful with the cars, as is the case here," she said.
“A debris field is a very close analogy to what we’re seeing out there,” said Mike Dennehy, the Interim Commissioner of Boston’s Public Works Department. “And as these piles get harder and harder, with temperatures hovering in the 20s every day, you can imagine how hard it’s going to be for some of these to finally thaw their way out.”
Dennehy says the buried cars are a real problem, preventing them from totally clearing many streets. But he says the city can’t dig them out.
“It’s so time consuming to get in and get at those piles," he said. "Our main concern is to keep opening up thoroughfares."
Dennehy says Boston has carted nearly 35,000 truckloads to snow farms around the city. That’s happened with the help of equipment from out of state. Dennehy says one of the big lessons from the last five weeks is that Boston needs to invest in truck-mounted snow blowers.
“It’s a tremendous asset," he said. "When you have to remove snow and you don’t have the farming capacity. As we all know, Boston’s parcels are becoming few and far between.”
In neighboring Chelsea, Public Works Director Joe Foti says they’ve been carting snow to a privately-owned, 7-acre lot that the owner is allowing the city to use.
"If we didn’t have that, we would be in trouble," Foti said. "We would have to be paying to bring it some place, to a snow farm."
Foti says his department is focusing on clearing heavily-traveled areas, and, like Boston, has made some two-way roads that were narrowed by snow into one-way roads.
“I’d say we were as prepared as anybody could be," he said. "But you’re never prepared for the amount of snow that we got and for the cold that we got right after, and again, no melting at all."
The state had been providing equipment and manpower to cities and towns to help with the snow removal, but as of last week, Massachusetts’ Emergency Management Agency spokesman Peter Judge said that was just for public safety concerns, and they were all done with that.
“Right now, the inconvenience factor is certainly there in many communities, but that being said, from a public safety perspective we felt it was time to pull back.
“I don’t know if I agree with that,” said Somerville Mayor Joseph Curtatone.
"I think every city and town still has imminent and serious public safety issues with access to and from neighborhoods," Curtatone said.
Curtatone says Somerville reached out on its own to get equipment to clear city roads of 111 million cubic feet of snow.
“Which was enough to fill Gillette Stadium up to the lights 12 times," he said. "Where do you put that?"
Curtatone says going through this experience will help the city be better ready to answer questions like that in the future.
“I think at the end of this, there’s great opportunity for municipalities and the region and the state to talk it through, what did we learn from this?" he said. "Is there a better way to be prepared? Though New England weather is always unpredictable, but if we ever had to mobilize such assets, could we do that? Because I don’t think there’s one person on any level of government at any agency in the public or private sector who wouldn’t tell you that we have to have more assets lined up for the future.”
To Ergun, that’s exactly the point.
“We can never be prepared for the most extreme event at 100 percent level," she said. "But the analysis — situational analysis and risk analysis — that we can do will help us to understand what is the right level of preparedness.”
She says if she were asked to, she could do a mathematical model to help the region prepare for more events like this.
"Of course, I would be happy to," she said, laughing.
And even though the fact that the snow hasn’t melted has presented a serious challenge, Ergun seems more worried about what happens when it does.
“I mean, these days the thing that keeps me awake at night is the question of what will happen if we hit 60 degrees all of a sudden one day, and then we’re going to have a big flooding event, instead of a snow event," she said. "And are we really thinking about that at this point, and how are we preparing."
For officials in Boston, Chelsea, Somerville and so many other cities and towns, that’s a concern, too.
