City of Calgary crews continue to assess trees and remove debris following the city’s largest September snowfall in 130 years.

“Dealing with the aftermath of this storm will take time,” said Anne Charlton, director of City of Calgary Parks. “In a typical year, we get about 2,000 service requests based on a tree emergency. In the last week, we have had three times that.”

To date, nearly 10,000 loads of tree debris, weighing an estimated five million kilograms, have been received by City of Calgary landfills.

“We’re staffing up a team of people across the city that will be active for probably 10 to 15 months on this debris cleanup as well as, going forward, replanting plants, street canopies, pruning trees so that we can make sure as many trees get through the winter and re-leaf and be healthy next year as possible.”

“We will not know the full extent of the damage until what we call leaf out in June of next year.”

According to city officials, the estimated public cost for immediate cleanup following the September storm is slated at $8 million.

Charlton adds a number of different agencies have partnered with the city to assist in the cleanup, including a number of fire crews, and the City of Edmonton has announced it will send bucket trucks and arborists to Calgary.

“We still have almost 3,000 service requests that are still open,” said Charlton. “We’re still assessing, we’re still responding to individual citizens, we have roving crews, we’re still doing ‘tree-age’ where we are simply cutting down and bucking up material and putting it on the boulevards and putting it on the edges of the road.”

“Many communities will see two or three sweeps of cleanup coming through. Debris management is not going to be a one shot deal,” adds Charlton. “We are looking at something similar to the roads cleanup in the spring where we can give communities advanced warning so they can move cars off certain streets to speed up final cleanups where we’re just simply loading materials into chippers or trucks.”

“Our goal is to have everything off the ground before the snow stays which is about a month away.”

The City of Calgary continues to reopen regional parks once officials have assessed and deemed the area safe.

Events scheduled to take place in city parks may be rescheduled to a later date or moved to a different location. Calgarians are advised to check event websites or contact event organizers.

The City of Calgary website includes information on park closures, tree debris collection and disposal, and the city blog has advice for citizens dealing with damaged trees.

Mayor Naheed Nenshi says, despite the significant destruction of trees and property, injury to Calgarians following the September storm was an uncommon occurrence.

 “As big as an event as this was, we were able to get through it with remarkably little injury and casualty and that is a big deal because people are looking after each other and staying safe and we hope that that will continue,” said Nenshi.