The city has rolled out its approach to snow and ice control for the season and says it is better prepared this winter.

Officials held a briefing on Thursday and say last year was challenging with abnormal stretches of cold and heavy snowfall in December.

“The bad news is, that might happen again, the good news is, I think we’re better prepared for that this winter,” said Sean Somers from the City of Calgary’s Transportation Department.

They now have the ability to hire on-demand contractors to help with snow removal if required.

“One of the things we saw last year during major snowfalls was, our crews were doing the main commuter routes meanwhile, the residential and collector roads were literally backing up with snow so what we’re going to have the ability to do now is call in these on-demand contractors and they will be working in tandem alongside city roads crews so that we don’t see that backlog of some of those secondary routes again,” said Somers.

Officials say they worked out a new extreme snow event plan over the summer, which will allow them to respond better to large volumes of snow.

“It is to address those occasions where we have extreme amounts of snow and we’re not able to get to our residential areas,” said Bill Biensch, Manager, Roads Maintenance. “What our plan does is it allows us to recognize when this is happening by having more eyes on the street and once we are not able to get into our day three, or day four, what we will do is we actually can call in more contracted services to be able to assist us in dealing with the snow in those areas.”

The city’s Emergency Management Agency will now also get involved if a snow event is called and there will be a coordinated effort between road crews and other city agencies like animal services and waste and recycling.

Warnings will no longer be handed out for those parked on Snow Routes and offenders will now be ticketed.

The city has 2000 lane kilometres of snow ban routes defined for this year and removed 70 kilometres of banned routes along roads that were not part of the transit network.

Parking bans are in place for 72 hours after they are called but can be lifted early by the city if warranted.

“New this year, we actually have a count-down timer on the City of Calgary website, which shows when we start the clock,” said Biensch.

The city will continue to use the Seven-Day plan for snow removal.

For more information on the City’s Snow and Ice Control program click HERE.