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More than 64 acres of sidewalks, 18.6 miles of roads and dozens and dozens of stairs that need to be cleared by hand — when a snow or ice storm hits the campus, that’s what awaits the UMass Amherst snow response team.

“It’s every paved surface,” says Todd Cournoyer, head of landscaping, who, with Pamela Monn, associate director for Custodial and Grounds Services, and Mike Dufresne, collection and moving manager for Waste Management, lead and coordinate the UMass snow response efforts.

The response team is significant: more than 225 people representing Construction Services, Landscaping, Waste Management, Moving Services and Custodial departments, both residential and academic, are called in to work on removal and remediation efforts during a storm. Fleet services are also on-call for truck and plow repairs if equipment breaks down.

Crews are allowed to work for 16 hours, and management has to balance deploying them during the storm for plowing with assigning them post-storm cleanup duties.

During the most recent snow and ice storm earlier this month, the sub-freezing temperatures during the daytime hours, coupled with reduced melting time due to a lack of sun, significantly delayed the clearing of walkways and other services to bare pavement. It was a problem experienced all across the state, as road crews from Boston to Great Barrington fought daily for nearly a week to remove heavy ice-coated snow and thick patches of ice before they refroze overnight.

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This storm response translated to UMass logging nearly 2,800 man-hours.  “It doesn’t matter if it’s 3 inches or 10 inches – it’s the same amount of people and equipment,” says Dufresne.

He adds that this includes about 15 people shoveling by hand, a chore that often goes on for days after a typical storm. “It [was] day six after an ice event, and we [were] still shoveling out trash corrals,” he says of the most recent storm. 

“We have to make decisions based on a forecast,” says Cournoyer. “If the forecast wasn’t right, our decisions won’t be as effective.” That was the case with this most recent storm. The forecast estimated that the precipitation would end at 7 p.m., but it was wrong by about five hours. “We staged our crews to be here at the end of the storm, but that’s not what happened,” he says.

“The industry standard is that 1 inch of snow takes one day to clear,” says Monn, but notes that, realistically, it’s highly dependent on the weather conditions. “The ideal storm is if the days leading up [to it] are dry,” she says, because that enables them to pretreat the roads with a salt brine. “Brining is worthless if it rains,” she says, adding that freezing rain also makes it less effective. 

“Sidewalk routes have been developed and assigned to sidewalk truck operators, who are responsible for clearing the sidewalks of snow and ice on their assigned routes,” says Monn, describing standard snow-clearing procedure. “There can be anywhere from one to six or more passes through by the operator to plow the sidewalks and apply salt, so each sidewalk sander route takes an average of four hours to complete.” 

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Generally speaking, the major sidewalks used by pedestrians get priority, as well as residential buildings where students with mobility challenges are living. She also explains that there is a service desk that responds to calls from the campus community and directs sidewalk sander operators to specific areas that need immediate attention.

To cover snow and ice removal for the 1,450-acre campus, there are 19 plows for sidewalks and 10 for roads, plus another 28 plows from an outside contractor that handle the paid parking lots.

If the forecast predicts ice after snow, the team will leave some material on the roads so that there’s something under the ice to scrape off. “That’s a hard call to make,” Monn says.

Another challenge unique to UMass is the campus’ tight layout: there is limited space to push and pile snow. These snowbanks can impede vision, narrow walkways and are constantly melting and refreezing, creating icy conditions on walkways.

“We’re just trying to make the place safe,” adds Cournoyer. “We just ask people to be patient.”