Some people living along a stretch of Richmond Road in the southwest say they are losing sleep because the city is firing up snow removal equipment in the middle of the night.

For the past two nights, city road crews have been clearing an eight block stretch overnight along the busy southwest roadway.

Tim Mueller says the crews get started at about midnight and the equipment is so loud it is keeping him up.

 “You cannot sleep, it’s not possible, loud scraping sounds, the sound of the machinery itself, beepers going off from the backup alarms, men screaming at each other trying to communicate over the sounds of all the  equipment. It’s not possible to sleep,” said Mueller.

Mueller says the commotion lasted several hours and he doesn't understand why crews were out in the middle of the night when there's barely any snow.

“There’s not a lot of snow here. We’ve had years where there’s been five, six times the amount and the city hasn’t done anything,  so I don’t understand why they’re doing it now. There was no notifications, no postings, no communications whatsoever so it’s really disrespectful to all the tenants and all the residents in the area,” said Mueller.

Mueller says he contacted the city and says he was told that city crews were exempt from the noise bylaw so he would have to deal with it.

“I phoned 311, three times, so three different occasions, and all three of the operators are saying, we’re exempt, and I’m saying, well I don’t care if you think you’re exempt, this is very disrespectful and they put in a complaint and supposedly at some point in time I will hear from somebody but I haven’t as of yet,” he said.

The warmer weather over the past couple of days is allowing city crews to catch up on some snow removal projects before it snows again and Richmond Road is considered a priority one route.

“On Richmond Road specifically, there isn’t a lot of wiggle room for us to move that snow so we had to come in with this kind of gap between snowfalls, we took the opportunity to go in and remove it,” said Jessica Bell from the City of Calgary Roads Deapartment.

The city says it had to clear what was left because the next time it snows, there would be nowhere to put the new accumulation.

“If we get another snowfall anytime soon there wouldn’t be any room to put that snow so we take advantage of these times in between the snowfalls to kind of prepare for the next one,” said Bell. “We need to make sure that when that snow does fall there's actually a driving lane so we have to remove the snow so that the next snowfall we're not just pushing snow into one of the driving lanes and making it more difficult for people to move around,” she said.

Some people who also live in the neighbourhood say the late night maneuvers were necessary as they were unable to park their cars in front of their homes because of the buildup.

Bell says the decision to clear snow at night was made to minimize the impact to traffic.

“So Richmond Road is a pretty busy road and so we try to do our best to minimize the impact to traffic. The equipment that we use to do snow removal moves kind of slowly so if we have a truck where the snow is being loaded into plus the snow blower we’re kind of taking up both the lanes and so we’re trying to impact traffic as little as possible so doing it overnight is the easiest way,” said Bell.

Mueller says as far as he is concerned there wasn’t enough snow to justify the late night clearing and says the whole thing is a waste of taxpayers’ money.

Click HERE to see city bylaws related to noise.

(With files from Ina Sidhu)