Building snow mountains: How Long Island is moving heaps of the white stuff to clear a region

A snow mountain, cragged and gray, loomed over the bocce courts in Huntington’s Mill Dam Park. The stuff sat in middens on the right of way off state roads. It sat in piles in the Hampton Bays fire department parking lot.

It has been more than a week since a massive winter storm dumped a foot of snow on Long Island, and most of it is not going to melt anytime soon. Temperatures rose briefly above freezing Monday, but nine days of subfreezing weather followed the storm, and more frigid air is forecast for the weekend. 

As a result, state and municipal cleanup workers on Long Island have had to dust off plans from blizzards past to move vast quantities of snow from places where buildup could present hazards — like roadsides or downtown business districts — to places where it can sit and safely await a thaw.

In Huntington’s hamlet business districts, hundreds of town workers loaded 5,000 tons of snow by payloader into garbage compactor and dump trucks, then built mountains at Mill Dam and Dix Hills parks, following a strategy they have used before for large snowstorms. At Mill Dam Monday morning, the mountain stood roughly 20 feet tall, 250 feet long and 30 feet wide. A Caterpillar wheel loader was parked at the foot of the mountain, temporarily idle. Crews were scheduled to hit Larkfield Road in Northport on Monday night.

Town officials cleared the snow and built the mountains because there were few alternatives, spokeswoman Christine Geed said.

"The berms were so high and so many that they were sight hazards," she said. "People can’t see around them, and for pedestrians, we want to remove all those types of hazards and deposit them in areas that are not going to be utilized" in the near future. The berms were also blocking roadside parking, she said.

There are more mountains alongside some state highways, where about 380 highway maintenance workers used loaders and dump trucks to haul "tons" of snow from shoulders, bridges and ramps, Stephen Canzoneri, a state Department of Transportation spokesman, said in an email.

There is a 2,000-ton mountain in Glen Cove’s Leech Circle Park and more mountains in Southold, where crews removed a few hundred truckloads of snow from Love Lane in Mattituck and Main Road in Cutchogue "just to get passable sidewalks and on-street parking reestablished," Highway Superintendent Dan Goodwin said. The mounds went up at Strawberry Fields fair grounds in Mattituck and on Highway Department land in Peconic.

In East Hampton, the mountains occupy parking lots that will be used in warmer months by surfers and swimmers at Atlantic Avenue and Ditch Plains beaches. Stephen Lynch, East Hampton’s highway superintendent, said town workers will use road sweepers to clear snow treatments or gravel after the snow melts.

Brookhaven, by and large, does not do mountains, because there are few business districts on town roads, Brookhaven Highway Superintendent Daniel Losquadro said.

Few Long Island municipalities have need of mechanical "hot tubs" like those New York City is using to melt its many tons of snow, or access to a combined sewer system like the city's that treats the hydrocarbons, garbage and sediments in some of the city’s snow melt, Losquadro said.

"On Long Island, our solution is, we push snow out of the way ... snow is allowed to melt, of its own volition," he said.

The difference in strategy has to do with geology, he said. Manhattan schist, the bedrock underlying much of the borough, is "incredibly dense ... nothing percolates through that, and nothing filters in the soil column." By contrast, on Long Island, "We basically sit on a sandbar and use our soil column as a filter to capture contaminants before they make it down through the ground into our aquifer," Losquadro said. 

Christopher Gobler, an ecologist at Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, said in an email that snow melt contamination was an "emerging topic of concern," especially for freshwater lakes and ponds that could be disrupted by salt contamination. Some researchers also believe that the brine solution sometimes used to treat icy roads could cause heavy metals in soil to leach out and make their way to water bodies.

Still, Gobler said, a "slow drip" — as from gradually melting snow — "will be less impactful than an ‘all at once’ deluge" that a rainstorm would produce.

In North Hempstead, town workers collected “hundreds” of truckloads of snow in one of the town parks, Supervisor Jennifer DeSena said in an emailed response forwarded by town spokesman Umberto Mignardi. Mignardi said the town will not filter the snow, but “the process has been implemented during past storm events with no adverse effects on grass or plant material.”

In Southampton, aside from the piles at Hampton Bays depot, most snow is simply pushed into the 10- or 15-foot strip of right of way on each side of the road, Highway Superintendent Charles McArdle said. Eventually, as in East Hampton, workers will use street sweepers to clean whatever sediment they can collect from the melted snow, the key word being melted.

"That’ll be when?" McArdle said. "July?"