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Illegal snow pile melting, but fines keep piling up
The three companies that dumped snow at this site at 40th Avenue and Fairbanks Street are fighting the city’s order to remove the 50-foot hill. (Photo by Eric Sowl/KTUU)
By Dan Fiorucci
KTUU-TV
Updated: 2:33 a.m. ET March 27, 2004March 23 - An illegal snow dump, located in a parking lot in Midtown Anchorage, is now a $48,000 pile of snow. That’s the fine that the municipality has assessed so far, and it’s climbing.

Not much has changed since early February, when it first became known that the snow was here illegally. The artificial hill is still about 50 feet high, the city is still ordering it removed, and the private firms responsible for putting it here are still fighting the order.

But 55 days after the “stop work” order was posted, the pile of snow still sits here, threatening a big melt this spring, especially with temperatures this week climbing above 40 degrees. City officials fear the private companies are deliberately delaying their response to the removal order, hoping the pile will just melt away.

Code Enforcement says it can’t allow this pile to just melt, because it will flood the intersection of 40th Avenue and Fairbanks Street, interfering with traffic. The city is also worried that the snow-melt — which contains toxins and gravel from area roadways — will pollute a nearby creek.

“You’re getting litter and sediment and stuff like that into the creek, plus it’s flooding the roads and getting into the storm drain,” says Jill Anne Inglis of the code enforcement office.

The reason that illegal snow dumps are becoming more of a problem in Anchorage is all the construction that’s been going on in the city. New condos have been going up in so many places that there are fewer open fields in which to dump snow. And Anchorage had a lot of snow this winter.

The snow dump problem is a pressing issue in northern cities everywhere.

“As you are well aware, in Anchorage, snow storage is a huge problem,” says Gary Rogers of Snow Removal Systems Inc. “And as cities grow — Anchorage, for example — there are less and less places to store the snow.”

A possible solution to the snow pile problem is a new kind of snow plow, which picks up snow, then instantly melts it. What comes out is ordinary water — at 40 degrees — which can be flushed right down a storm drain. The city of Toronto has ordered more than 20 of these snow-melting plows.

“They have come to me and said we’re only going to melt snow going forward, and you have the cleanest system that’s available on the market,” says Rogers, whose company makes the trucks.

The snow-melting plow is a system being considered for Anchorage by Mayor Mark Begich, but the company that makes this model says it would work for private snow haulers, as well, because one snow-melting plow takes the place of three vehicles — a snowplow, dump truck and grader — so the system is very economical.

Now that may be the future of snow removal, a system that picks up snow and melts it immediately, but this is the present — a system in which snow is picked up and carted to dumps. So that leaves the problem of this and other illegal snow storage sites.

Anchorage Code Enforcement has scheduled a hearing for April 7 to decide what’s to happen to the Fairbanks Street pile. Meanwhile, the fine continues to grow at the rate of $900 a day for the three companies involved. Unless that’s overturned at the hearing, it could turn into a very expensive hill of snow.