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by NittLion78 1755 days ago
Chicago pretty easily unburied itself out of two major snowstorms and extreme (even by normal standards) cold snaps. At least when it comes to the extreme weather the city faces, that part is handled.

General corruption/waste is another matter. Recycling in Chicago right now is notably inefficient, for example (something like a 9% clearance rate).
2 comments
da_chicken 1755 days ago
> Chicago pretty easily unburied itself out of two major snowstorms and extreme (even by normal standards) cold snaps. At least when it comes to the extreme weather the city faces, that part is handled.

That's not really the question, though. The question is if you'd be surprised if they didn't.

I wouldn't be that surprised to hear that Chicago was unable to clear snow from a 100-year snow event because the funds were mismanaged or something similar. That sounds entirely within character.

I wasn't surprised when I heard about the ongoing problems with the Texas power grid, either. I was horrified by the deaths, of course, but did it surprise me that an for-profit utility market didn't result in a robust infrastructure? No. Infrastructure and utilities don't work well under those sort of economic pressures. I wasn't surprised it was fragile.

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BorgHunter 1755 days ago
> I wouldn't be that surprised to hear that Chicago was unable to clear snow from a 100-year snow event because the funds were mismanaged or something similar. That sounds entirely within character.

Former Mayor Michael Bilandic famously lost reelection in 1979 after botching snow removal following the large blizzard of that same year. Ever since, snow removal has been one of the city government's core competencies; even the quite intense Groundhog Day blizzard of 2011 was well-handled, though it managed to shut down LSD for a bit. There's plenty of mismanagement and corruption in city government to go around (the police department is famously corrupt and incompetent and shows no signs of turning that around), but snow removal is one thing that can generally be counted on here.

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ghaff 1755 days ago
Weather forecasting today is also much better than it was in the 1970s. The Blizzard of '78 in especially the Boston area would still be bad and the city might even still be largely shut down for a bit, but you probably wouldn't have the spectacle of mass evacuation from cars on Route 128 because the highway had literally ground to a complete halt.
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OldHand2018 1755 days ago
They actually studied the cause of Lake Shore Drive shutting down in the blizzard and found that it was because of a cascading series of cars and busses got stuck, preventing plows from reaching sections of the road. So they built removable median sections in strategic locations that allow snow plows to bypass traffic snarls and free up the road again.
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OldHand2018 1755 days ago
> I wouldn't be that surprised to hear that Chicago was unable to clear snow from a 100-year snow event because the funds were mismanaged or something similar. That sounds entirely within character.

I guess if you’ve never lived near Chicago or visited in the winter, that might be reasonable. But they take snow extremely seriously. Like so seriously it’s funny. It truly is. The “mismanagement of funds” is true - they spend a lot of money on snow management.

They have over 200 snowplows, and every single garbage truck has a plow attachment so it can be put into plowing service, most of the city pickup truck fleet as well, etc.

[1] > Department of Streets & Sanitation (DSS) coordinates Chicago's snow and ice control efforts from Snow Command. This high tech command center allows us to access and view a network of cameras and pavement sensors to get a quick and accurate assessment of our pavement conditions citywide. We track incoming weather systems via Doppler radar and through constant communication with our meteorological consultants and the National Weather Service. And we combine all of these technologies along with the Global Positioning Systems (GPS) on all of our trucks to strategically deploy our snow personnel to up to over 280 snow routes.

People used to claim that the streets that alderman lived on got plowed first whenever it snowed, so the city put GPS on everything and built a plow tracking website, so you can see where everything is in realtime, any time it snows. [2]

[1] https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/streets/provdrs/street...

[2] https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/streets/supp_info/plow...

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gogopuppygogo 1755 days ago
Not to mention that unfunded pensions are an Illinois speciality these days.
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