Snow Goes in a New York Minute
By Ellen Barry
Times Staff Writer
February 14, 2006
NEW YORK — By midday Monday, snow that had been white and fluffy the day before was grainy and salt-crusted, massed in ugly geological formations at the curb.
People who had tumbled happily into the snow on Sunday afternoon wished on Monday morning that it would disappear.
And at the corner of Broad and Water streets, near the tip of Manhattan, that was exactly what it was doing.
Steam seethed out of a vat of agitated water warmed by a diesel engine. A front-end loader tipped load after load of snow into the vat known by workers as "the hot tub." Water gurgled through a manhole and disappeared beneath the street.
Snow — solid, crusty, spiked with pollutants and the occasional hubcap — presents one of the oldest of urban dilemmas.
On Sunday morning, as the record-breaking storm moved slowly over Manhattan, Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty was remembering the days when trucks gathered snow from the city's streets and dumped it into the Hudson River. The mound of snow, poking out of the river, was so solid that a tugboat was summoned to churn up the water.
The fact was, many New Yorkers lived with mountains of snow until April. Rocco DiRico could remember it, he said, "as clearly as if it was yesterday," as he watched load after load of snow melt and disappear in the machine.
"You get a lot of self-satisfaction getting rid of it," said DiRico, an assistant commissioner of the Department of Sanitation. "It's magic."
It would require many dump trucks to carry it.
