Snow removal and disposal are important and expensive activities in Montreal and many northern cities. Although snow can be cleared from streets and sidewalks by plowing and shoveling, in prolonged subfreezing temperatures, the resulting banks of accumulated snow can impede pedestrian and vehicular traffic and must be removed.
To allow timely removal and disposal of snow, a city is divided into several sectors and snow removal operations are carried out concurrently in each sector. In Montreal, accumulated snow is loaded into trucks and hauled away to disposal sites (e.g., rivers, quarries, sewer chutes, surface holding areas). The different types of disposal sites can accommodate different amounts of snow due to the physical size of the disposal facility. The annual capacities for five different snow disposal sites are given below (in 1,000s of cubic meters).