Three days after the snow stopped falling, patches of New York City remain buried. Snow blocking the bus stops. Snow encasing cars. Snow turning crosswalks into single-track paths. Snow everywhere, tons upon tons, and little chance that any of it will melt on its own anytime soon.
How might a big, powerful city like New York regain its mastery over such a frozen nuisance?
By dumping mountains of it into eight hot tubs placed strategically around the city. Obviously.
On Wednesday morning, the city’s Sanitation Department deployed one such tub — imagine the dumping end of a dump truck painted fluorescent orange — near the southern tip of Manhattan. Next to the machine sat a long pile of gray snow gathered from the roughly 12 inches that fell on the city over the weekend. Enough, in the estimation of Javier Lojan, acting sanitation commissioner, to cover a football field.
The hot tub — officially, the Trecan Combustion 60-PD Snowmelter — arrived from a city garage on Tuesday morning. It took 30 minutes to get the machine warmed up, said Joshua Goodman, a spokesman for the Sanitation Department. It remained in operation nearly all day, with short pauses only every eight hours to prevent overheating, Mr. Goodman said.
On Wednesday morning, a bright orange front-end loader accelerated toward the snow pile, its bucket scraping the ground and gathering, according to Mr. Lojan, half a ton of snow. After an awkward three-point turn, the loader advanced gingerly toward the tub with its bucket raised. The loader’s operator shook the bucket, causing the entire vehicle to bounce on its bulbous tires. The snow and ice dropped into the snow melter and a burst of steam shot from the hopper. Soon, a stream of brown water ran from a downspout in the machine’s belly directly into an open sewer manhole.
Half a ton of snow melted in seconds.
But there was so much more left. The operation will continue through the middle of February, Mr. Lojan expected. According to the latest forecast, it may be more than two weeks before temperatures climb above freezing long enough for the sun to start melting all this snow the natural way.
Until then, the enduring snow piles of New York will require mechanical intervention.
“It’s quite the sight to see,” Mr. Lojan said of the hot tub at work.
It turns out that a hot tub that melts snow is not particularly hot. The water inside the machine is heated to only 38 degrees, Mr. Lojan said.
The logistics required to keep the melters fed are rather more complex, however. The city owns 27 melting machines, but is running only eight of them because so many staff members are needed for other tasks, Mr. Lojan said, including clearing snow from bus stops.
By Wednesday morning there was a hot tub on Staten Island and one in the Bronx, as well as two each in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens. The big machines can melt 120 tons of snow an hour. (The tub in Lower Manhattan is comparatively small, capable of melting at half that rate.)
The pace of the operation is something of an art. Dumping too much snow into the machine too quickly will cool the water inside, and bog down the melting; dump too little too slowly and the tub will overheat.
As Mr. Lojan spoke, a line of eight dump trucks formed along South Street with more loads to be melted. With a wave from a Sanitation Department worker, the first truck in line — a red Kenworth operated by a company called Cariati Developers — reversed at walking speed toward the hot tub. When it got close, the driver stopped and lifted the truck’s rear end, dumping a load of snow onto the street. Then the truck’s tailgate slammed back into the vehicle, causing a loud bang that reverberated through the quiet downtown streets.
To keep this process going across the city for the next few weeks, the Sanitation Department is working around the clock, Mr. Lojan said, with 2,500 employees assigned to each 12-hour shift. Another 500 emergency shovelers have been hired to dig out sidewalks and bus stops, plus 300 temporary workers to operate heavy machinery.
All of these workers will be pushing snow that will eventually get dumped into the lukewarm hot tubs, which the department hasn’t deployed since 2021, said Mr. Lojan, who has worked with the agency for 27 years. The tubs are needed in part to prepare the city for this weekend, when forecasts predict a 30-percent chance of additional snow falling on New York, according to the National Weather Service.
“These cold snaps are really hard to deal with,” Mr. Lojan said. “The snow is just not melting.”
Christopher Maag is a reporter covering the New York City region for The Times.
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