Deneigement

I've been learning some French words here and there, whether by puzzling them out myself or asking a Francophone friend in the States. Once you start knowing a few words, it makes new ones easier to figure out, and there are a lot of suffix and prefix cognates from English to French.

canneberge--cranberry
neige--snow
sauge--sage
tasse--cup

This leads me to my favorite French word so far, which I first saw on a TV news report: "deneigement." De-snow-ment? Oh, like snow removal!

Montreal is serious about its deneigement. For one thing, I noticed on this news report that there's a guy whose job is "directeur de l'Unité de déneigement." So the Montreal urban area (l'Unite) has a director of snow removal, and I guess its this guy's job to think about snow removal all year long, even when it isn't snowing.

Once we started learning about deneigement, a few things came together.

First of all, the sidewalks are incredibly cleared considering it's just been snowing and snowing and snowing since we got here...maybe a foot or two. If you check this video out at about :30, you'll see the little thing responsible for it.



Then there was that...odd noise at night, that sounded like an air raid siren--and believe me, after our exciting fire drill our first night here, I was on alert to any subsequent alarms for some time. Turns out that it is the tow truck warning siren. Before the parking area of a street is plowed, the deneigement people put out a sign with times that the street should remain clear so it can be plowed. Then this truck comes along the street and makes a really loud noise to remind everyone to move their car...then, just minutes before the tow truck comes, the noise truck goes and sits beside each car and blows its horn for like 5 minutes in a last-ditch attempt to get someone to come move the car.



And since there's too much snow to simply push it off the road--the sidewalks need to be clear too--where does the snow go? Behold:



So these big trucks with plows underneath come and push all of the snow to the center, then this other truck with this grabby bit sucks the snow up and shoots it into a truck driving parallel to it, and then the snow is taken away to outside of town!

People complain about snow removal here just the way they do anywhere else, but compared to where I'm from, this is a well-oiled machine.