The challenge facing Montreal snow-removal crews this week is without precedent: two big storms back to back have left more than 70 centimetres of snow to clear.
It’s the most in a four-day period on record, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada. A city official marvelled recently that the size of the snowbanks means the blower will need to pass two or even three times to fully clear one side of a street.
Still, the city crews are equipped with far more powerful machines than they had in the past.
Until the early 20th century, the city had to rely on horse-drawn plows, and often solelyΒ people and their shovels, to clear away the snow. In some cases, snow wasn’t removed at all, as archival photos show.Β
Smaller city streets and roads in rural areas were often closed to traffic through the winter months throughout the late 1920s and beyond, said Yves Laberge, a historian and sociologist who teaches at the University of Ottawa.
“It was a big issue back then, and it took days after a big snowstorm to returnΒ to a normal life,” said Laberge, who has documented the history of snow removal in Quebec in the history journalΒ Cap-aux-Diamants.
“In rural Quebec, there were places or villages that were very much isolated from the other ones.”
Shovels and horses
From the middle of the 1800s to the turn of the century, residents in Montreal were responsible for clearing the sidewalk in front of their house β and often the road as well, accordingΒ to the city.
That changed afterΒ the turn of the century, when the city took charge. In the early 1900s, labourers were hired to shovel snow for 25 cents an hour. It was taken away in horse-drawn carts.
The first snowblower to clear the streets was purchased by the City of MontrealΒ nearly 100 years ago, in 1928.
The inventor, Arthur Sicard, was born in 1876 in Saint-LΓ©onard-de-Port-Maurice, which is now the Montreal borough of Saint-LΓ©onard. At the time, it was mostly farmland, and Sicard was reportedly inspired by watching a grain thresher at work in a wheat field.
He wondered if a similar device could be used to clear snow, according to theΒ entry on the snowblower in the Canadian Encyclopedia.
In 1925, he completed his first machine and called it “la dΓ©neigeuse et souffleuse Γ neige Sicard,” which translates to “the Sicard snowplow and snowblower.”
Attached to the front of a truck, the original design featured a scooper with an auger and a fan capable of blowing snow more than 25 metres.
The rise of the machine
Sicard sold his first snowblowers to the cities of Outrement and Montreal in 1927 for $13,000 each.
By then, Montreal had also begun using more motorized plows to clear snow from the streets.
The City of Montreal acquired two more snowblowers from Sicard’s firm in 1938.
The machines included “a combined scraper, conveyor, blower, loading pipe with appropriate hydraulically driven mechanism,” according to city archives.
One pamphlet from the Quebec government described the machine as an “insatiable monster” that could send snow 23 metres into the distance.
The design proved effective. SicardΒ “was hailed as a genius who changed the city’s relationship with winter,”Β the Canadian Encyclopedia entry said.
Sicard StreetΒ was named after him, near the factory where the snowblowers were constructed.
“His team who built the snow machine, they are in my view great Canadian heroes and they should be celebrated,” Laberge said.
Great expectations
The rise of the automobile, though, put increased pressure on crews to clear the streets more quickly.
In 1962, Montreal city director J.-V. ArpinΒ said during a presentation thatΒ the challenge had become immense, with more than one million people in the city centre each day, including 350,000 in automobiles.
“Motorists expect to drive to work in the morning on a bare pavement after a night storm,” he said.
These days, that challenge has multiplied, with roughly 800,000 personal vehiclesΒ registered on the island and an even greater expectation we should be able to get around quickly after rough weather.
On Wednesday, Mayor ValΓ©rie Plante, whose administration has faced criticism for its handling of the cleanup, urged patience.
“We want you to know that everyone is working extremely hard,” she said. “We’re making good progress, I’d like to say, in the midst of anΒ historic storm.”
Laberge, for his part, said it’s important to remember how much we struggled in the face of snow storms of the past.
“Winters have always been an issue and we and Canadians have always been able to deal with snow storms, the ice, the cold, the winters,” he said. “It’s part of us.”