Safety issues curb trail clearing

By Gillian Slade on January 3, 2019.

gslade@medicinehatnews.com @MHNGillianSlade

Some Medicine Hat walking trails will no longer be cleared of snow and pedestrians using them will do so at their own risk, says the city’s parks and recreation department.

“We know it’s important for people to get outdoors … but we can’t do that at the expense of putting our staff in danger or wrecking our infrastructure,” department manager Randy Taves said.

About 65 km of trails have been cleared of snow in the past but safety audits have deemed it “unsafe for our staff to clean the trails,”said Taves. The equipment does not provide adequate traction and when there is a steep incline, with no guard rails, the machinery tends to slide.

“We’ve had some near misses in the past couple of years,” said Taves. “We are trying to improve our health and safety program and there was a gap that we couldn’t get around any further.”

The city is still determining how many trails will be affected. So far signs have been posted at the bottom of Dunmore Road for the Saratoga Trail, some trails in Ross Glen, the Southeast Hill Trail that crosses Hill Road, Strathcona Island Park and from McCoy High School down toward Altawana Drive. About 10 km is impacted.

The Saratoga Trail gets icy due to water released from the surrounding coulees. There are also boardwalk sections and wooden bridges over Seven Persons Creek.

“There are concerns with the load capacity. They weren’t designed for heavier maintenance equipment to go over them,” said Taves, citing an engineering report declaring it unsafe for the city to take current equipment over those bridges.

“Some of those bridges are quite high and so if they did collapse … not only would they be wrecked … but an operator could get hurt,” said Taves.

The Southeast Hill Trail has some steep inclines and without guard rails it would be easy for equipment to slide off the trail and “end up at the bottom of the hill by Patterson’s Funeral Home,” said Taves.

Putting grit down is not a solution because machinery is required to distribute the grit putting employees at risk, said Taves.

The city is looking at alternative equipment that is lighter with better traction and some guard rails will also have to be installed, he said. Hundreds of people with hand shovels or a snowblower would also only work in milder weather.

“Can you imagine walking behind a snow blower when it is 20 below?” (covering the distance of a trail) said Taves. “That’s an unsafe condition in itself.”

The city endeavours to remove snow from trails within 72 hours but there is no bylaw requiring this. There is a bylaw requiring sidewalks to be cleared within 24 hours, said Taves.

“We’ve never had a bylaw for clearing trails,” said Taves.

“We don’t like the idea that we had to loose 10 km of trail and we know that the public has been used to the service provided in the past.

“You don’t have to go on an icy leisure trail if you don’t want to. Side walks are different because people have to go to work or catch a bus … that’s why there is a higher standard for a sidewalk.”

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