The City of Charlottesville officially declared snowfall from the recent winter storm over at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 25.
That means, per Charlottesville City Code, all the city’s sidewalks and right-of-ways had to be cleared and walkable by 7:30 p.m. Monday.
Obviously, that didn’t happen.
Days after the weekend’s severe winter storm, sidewalks across the city remain stubbornly impassable. And since the snowfall has frozen into ice, it’s downright dangerous to commute on foot.
“I walk to work,” one resident posted Wednesday in a lengthy Reddit thread on sidewalk conditions in Charlottesville. “If only half the people clear their sidewalks you might as well be walking in the road the whole way to avoid the frequent clambering over.”
In Charlottesville, as in most American cities, it’s a property owner’s responsibility to remove ice and snow from the sidewalks that run along their property.
The system never really works. And after every snowfall pedestrians confront a patchwork of cleared sidewalks, snow drifts and impassable gaps that force them into the street.
The trouble is, the very thing that makes this storm so dangerous for pedestrians is also what makes it so difficult to clear — ice.
“I’ve moved snow in the blizzard of ’93 and the blizzard of ’96 back when I lived in Pennsylvania, I’m talking 24 to 28 inches of snow, and that was a cakewalk compared to these big, heavy slabs with ice underneath,” Charlottesville resident Greg Lepore told Charlottesville Tomorrow on Thursday. “I watched a crew today at Costco trying to clear the sidewalk in front of an apartment complex — eight guys with axes and pick axes and shovels and they were making zero headway.”
It took Lepore around four hours to clear an 800 foot driveway using a tractor and loader, he said, adding that he couldn’t imagine having to clear a sidewalk, especially with regular tools.
Shoveling snow can also be unexpectedly dangerous. Aside from car crashes and falls, the most common causes of snow-related injuries are heart attacks — often from shoveling snow — due to the combination of heavy exertion and cold weather constricting blood vessels and adding extra pressure on the heart.
Lepore knows this danger better than most. When he was about 15, he witnessed a neighbor— a seemingly healthy father in his late fifties with no history of heart issues — collapse and die from a heart attack while shoveling a pile of snow that a plow had left at the end of his driveway.
“It’s not just dangerous for the elderly, is also the point,” Lepore told Charlottesville Tomorrow.
Still, clear sidewalks are critical for the safety of folks who must commute on foot, said Kyle Ervin, a spokesperson for the City of Charlottesville.
“God forbid, those sidewalks aren’t cleared and people are forced to go out in the road, that could cause an accident,” Ervin said. “We don’t want that to happen. So it is very important for families that have strollers, people that utilize wheelchairs or mobility devices, or just people having to not slip on the sidewalk. We want to mitigate any of those risks.”
And beginning likely next week, those pedestrians will include somewhere around 1,000 children walking to public school, he added.
With that in mind, city code enforcement earlier this week began issuing warnings to property owners with uncleared sidewalks. The warnings give property owners 24 hours to remove the ice, or the city will hire a crew to do the work and charge the property owner.
“What we’re concerned about right now is just making sure that those sidewalks are cleared for pedestrian safety and anyone that’s going to be on them,” Ervin said.
Some property owners who received those notices were not happy.
One Charlottesville resident who works at a local business — and asked to be referred to only by his first name because he didn’t want the business identified — said that the business got a snow removal warning notice from the Department of Neighborhood Development Services on Jan. 28.
The notice warned that the business had 24 hours to clear the sidewalk, or the city could clear the sidewalk and charge the costs of removal to the business.
John explained that the business had hired their regular snow removal contractors prior to the snowstorm, but they showed up three days late, 30 minutes after the notice was posted.
“We use the same vendors for every storm, but this storm was different than the others, this storm was a little crazy,” he explained. “Our snow removal people were just running on empty, running out of gas, they broke a bunch of their equipment, their plows were breaking, and so they literally just couldn’t get to us for a while.”
Several businesses in Charlottesville are likely facing similar issues, he added, as well as buildings that are owned by property managers who own multiple properties and need to hire contractors that are likely backed up and overwhelmed.
“Someone else said this is not snow removal, this is glacier deconstruction, and that’s the perfect analogy for what’s going on,” he said.
For many Charlottesville residents, the sidewalks are difficult — if not impossible — to clear on their own.
“The city is reminding us to clear our sidewalks (which the city owns, not us) within 24 hours,” Charlottesville resident Deborah Buchanan wrote in an email to Charlottesville Tomorrow. “I am elderly with heart issues. There is absolutely no way I can shovel icy snow, and I’m not alone.”
For folks who genuinely cannot clear the ice, the city partnered with The United Way of Greater Charlottesville to create a volunteer snow removal project — connecting volunteers with the elderly and folks with mobility or health issues that make shoveling impossible. As of Thursday evening, 12 people had volunteered and more than 220 households had reached out for assistance. But by Friday afternoon, that number had grown to 231.
As photos of citations made their way through Charlottesville’s Reddit channels and across social media, residents complained that it seemed unfair that they were being cited when the city itself had not cleared all its sidewalks.
As of Thursday evening, the City of Charlottesville was still clearing the 49 miles of sidewalks it is responsible for.
That 49 miles includes roughly 31 miles of sidewalks designated as “safe routes to school” for the city’s public school students. The rest are sidewalks around public parks, city-owned buildings and public schools. City officials did not say which sidewalks it had cleared Thursday, and which were remaining.
The school division, however, said it has been hard at work to unearthing school grounds.
The effort has been “all hands on deck,” City Schools spokesperson Amanda Korman told Charlottesville Tomorrow.
“I was just on-site, and they’re not using regular snow tools,” she said, Thursday afternoon. “They’re breaking the ice and working hard to clear the sidewalks and roads.”
Korman also said that everyone from custodians to contractors to city employees are joining the effort. Shifts start daily after the sun rises, to get help from the sun melting the snow.
“Thanks to the herculean efforts of our custodians, City Public Works and contractors, the vast majority of the sidewalks around schools have been cleared,” she said.
The sidewalk on Tufton Avenue next to Summit Elementary required heavy machinery to clear out, Korman said, adding that the combination of snow and freezing rain made the task feel as if they were “plowing limestone.”
“As of this afternoon all of these teams are still hard at work on sidewalks around schools as well as all paths that students and staff use around school grounds,” she said on Thursday.
Schools will remain closed until next week, according to a news release from CCS.
Once the schools reopen, it will be even more important that all city sidewalks are clear. While the city will handle clearing the designated routes, children may deviate from, or have to commute to, those paths.
“I know people are concerned with citations and fines,” Ervin said. “What we really need to be concerned about is helping each other out and getting these sidewalks cleared.”
