Snow is melting fast and both Steinbach and Niverville need to move quickly to clean things up, unfortunately, Thursday's snowstorm interrupted that process. 

Head of Steinbach Public Works Randy Reimer says many of the areas they cleared earlier this week have since drifted over, that along with the necessary road clearing has delayed crews by about a day.

With temperatures of well into the positives forecasted for the coming days, Reimer implies that his crews are racing against the weather.

“The temperature is supposed to climb significantly next week and it's going to start to melt so we want clear the problematic drains first.” Reimer indicates that opening drains and ditches was his crew’s primary goal before the blizzard hit and says they will get right back at it on Monday.

Meanwhile, Niverville Operations Manager Ryan Dyck says his team has also been hard at work.

“We have two crews working," he explains, "one crew is taking care of the exterior drainage outside of the dike, and then we have another internal crew digging out ditches and hauling snow away from the culverts in case we have to steam them.” He says it will take roughly 10 more working days to get everything cleared.

As this routine clearing continues for each respective community, Reimer does not expect frozen culverts to be of major concern considering the area has not experienced a lot of melting during the winter."So we think that our culvert steaming will be minimal this year,” states Reimer, who believes this will greatly expedite the process.

Dyck, on the other hand, is not quite as optimistic. “I’ve had years where I thought it would be fairly simple and then we ended up having to steam every culvert, so we really won’t know until things start melting and flowing.” 

Dyck encourages his fellow residents to contact Operations if they have a flooding concern and reminds them that their needs will be dealt with on a priority basis.

Though the blizzard proved to be a small hiccup, both Dyck and Reimer agree that the clean-up process should remain relatively smooth. 

“We don’t foresee any major problems,” Reimer reasons, “but if we have really warm temperatures and add a day or two of rain we could have some issues.”

According to Dyck, if the area sees temperatures upwards of +5 this weekend there may be trouble, but otherwise draining should go as planned.