Mr. Freeze

If Hwy. 401 in Southern Ontario were a battlefield, then Gord Troughton would make a great field general. Every winter the Ontario Ministry of Transportation civil engineer, who commands 96 pieces of snow removal equipment over a 150-kilometre stretch of 400-series highways between Niagara and Durham regions, gets drafted to take on a re-emerging enemy: Old Man Winter.

The way Troughton speaks about his snow-removal strategies, one would think he picked up some hints from the Canadian military in 1999 when Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman called in the troops to dig out the city from one of the worst snowstorms in its history.

“That really was my first winter in Toronto, so I had to wonder what I had gotten myself into,” he says of the storm that dumped 100 centimetres of snow over a two-week period. Troughton admits the severity and duration of the storm caught even him by surprise. He learned to expect anything. Like the flakes they produce, no two snowstorms are exactly alike, and Troughton has learned that keeping North America’s busiest highway flowing through the flurries is a job for the most savvy of tacticians.

Gathering Intelligence

During the winter season, Troughton’s top lieutenant is the weatherman. He keeps a watchful eye on TV and radio weather bulletins, as wells as 30 ARWIS stations — mini weather terminals located across the province that use, among other devices, satellite imagery to measure air temperature, wind speed and direction, and pavement temperature. The information is shared with Environment Canada, which provides the Ministry with custom weather forecasts.

Knowing that storms traditionally move west to east, Troughton co-ordinates a fleet of plows, spreaders, and combination units and administers them accordingly across the highway series. Ready for action within 20 minutes of being dispatched, the operators, who are almost all contracted, stand by at the yards when a storm seems imminent. Like a firehouse, the yards have beds to accommodate operators, while keeping them on-duty, during extended storms.

Meanwhile, Troughton’s foot soldiers — what he calls patrolmen — travel up and down the highways 24 hours a day during snowfall warnings. As the first flakes fall to ground, the patrolmen monitor the accumulation and report back to dispatch. It’s an unofficial rule, but when two centimetres of snow is on the ground, the patrolmen signal back to the office and make the call to send in the heavy-equipment.

Send in the Artillery

The first units to be dispatched are the sand and salt spreaders, with the snowplows usually following behind by half an hour. If the storm is severe enough, Troughton will send all three types of equipment out as a convoy.

The spreaders spray a liquid brine solution of dissolved salt to prevent ice from bonding to the road. The plows follow, removing the broken ice and snow. Sand spreaders are seldom used — required only to add traction to roads when ice forms too quickly for the salt spreaders to do their job. Computerized spreader controls govern the rate at which salt is applied and adjusts the amount automatically for the truck’s road speed and for a two- or four-lane highway. “If you look at the cabs of some of these trucks, the dashboards look like a tank’s with all the wires and computers,” Troughton says.

Attack the Flank at Dawn

In the heart of Toronto, the 401 is 16 lanes wide. With eight lanes to plow in each direction, including express and collector lanes, Troughton sends out his fleet in groups of three, each spanning the highway in an echelon formation. “One group will do all the way from the median barrier to the separator barrier in the core (express) lanes. That snow is then tossed up over the barrier into the collector lane,” he explains. “The second group, the collector plows, push it off all the way to the right. So, in effect, everything is plowed from the centre median all the way to the right. Then a third set of plows do the transfer lanes between the core and collectors. One pass is hopefully good enough, before those groups break apart and start to do the ramps and overpasses.”

It’s effective in the early mornings and late evenings, before and after the gridlock of rush hour. But Troughton knows he can’t control the forces of nature or predict an ambush just before the evening commute. “When I first came to Toronto, I was convinced it only snowed here during rush hour, which is the worst time for us,” he says. “In any sort of bad weather traffic grinds to a halt. Because of the co-ordination and space we need for sometimes 18 to 20 plows at a time, we usually try to wait until rush hour is over. It’s pointless to have plows crawling with traffic at 5 kilometres an hour.”

It comes down to a case-by-case decision, but if it snows heavily throughout the day, Troughton will send a few spreaders to hold the fort in between the morning and afternoon rush hours, keeping the ice and snow loose for the plows later on. As the culmination of rush hour nears, the plows start at the tail ends of traffic, where gridlock is less, and simply follow the endless line of red brake lights.

It had been years since Toronto had seen an extended storm front like the one that blew over the city three years ago. Although Troughton admits he’s not enthusiastic about tangling with another one soon, he says he and his crew have learned over the last few years not to take any storm for granted. The number-one rule, he says, is to act as quickly and decisively as the circumstances allow.

The approach is in line with the teachings of an actual battle-worn general. General George Patton once said, “A good solution applied with vigor now is better than a perfect solution applied 10 minutes later.” Patton also preached, “Never let the enemy pick the battle site.”

Well, there’s not much Troughton can do about that one.