Snow is not an excuse
After long autumn it is finally winter in Helsinki, with 20 centimeters of snow that came down in just few days. Finnish snow-how is tested with rigour and regularity. Despite the weather, urban life keeps pulsating and air travel rolling.
Tram tracks being cleared from snow at Helsinki city centre during the blizzard on 30 November 2012. Photo: Taivasalla.net (Creative Commos).
Snow chaos frequently closes European airports in the winter – something Finns can only smile at. After all, the downfall is rarely more than ten centimetres. The Helsinki airport was last shut down eight years ago, for half an hour, and even then because of a technical failure coinciding with a snow storm.
The capital gets its fair share of snow, however – especially so in the past three winters. The overall snowfall in the Helsinki region has averaged some two metres, which sounds more impressive than the cityscape may have led one to believe. This is because the snow banks settle and some of the snow melts or evaporates, reducing the depth of snow to some 70 centimetres.
With climate change increasing the occurrence of severe weather phenomena, there is a huge demand for urban planning related to extreme weather conditions, as well as for more advanced weather modelling. During the wait of new weather models and smarter urban design solutions, countries would do well to turn their eyes on the north and learn from our rough-weather tested work methods and service design.
And learn they do! Journalists, photographers and other representatives of the international media arrive at the Helsinki-Vantaa airport every winter to admire the Finnish snow-how – provided they’ve been able to take off from their home airports.
One of the secrets of Helsinki-Vantaa is its three runways. When one is being cleared of snow, the other two are in use. According to Jyrki Pulkkinen, head of airport maintenance, the movement of work machines on the field resembles a choreographed ballet.
The airport has 250 different snow clearing machines as well as 23 work schemes mapped out in advance and applied according to the wind, weather and traffic conditions. Blower-sweeper-ploughs often travel in a diagonal formation at 35 to 40 kilometres an hour, clearing the three-kilometre runway in 11 to 13 minutes.
Declaring the snow war
It is actually quite easy to remove the snow from a flat and empty 60-metre-wide runway, but the same snow load also falls down in the hilly and congested city centre bustling with people and vehicles.
‘Snow rally’ gets a whole new meaning in wintertime Helsinki. Tractors lift ploughed snow piles from street sides into trucks that cart them off to special snow dumps. Last year the snow carried away from the city’s streets amounted to 155,000 truckloads; the previous year to a colossal 320,000.
“Of course it seems strange carting away material that would melt away come spring. But it must be done to keep the streets open to traffic,” says Ville Alatyppö, project manager in charge of winter street maintenance in Helsinki.
In late winter, trucks run up a snow mound over 30 metres high in Maununneva, a north-western suburb of Helsinki, to dump their loads, raising the peak higher and higher.
“It’s a real challenge getting the mound to melt before the following winter. It can still be ten metres in the autumn despite machines working with the snow to speed up melting,” says Alatyppö.
Helsinki has a total of 500 snow ploughs and twice as many trucks for snow clearance, and when that is not enough, the city declares a ‘snow war’ and summons additional vehicles from the surrounding regions.
This is a feat that deserves the admiration of less snowy countries – especially since nothing ever seems to satisfy Helsinki city dwellers. They want service to be even faster. When the city launched a website for residents to report snow problems, the amount of feedback crashed the server. The most demanding residents wanted the streets to be clear of snow by seven in the morning, whatever the snowfall.
This article by Antti Kivimäki has been originally published in Helsinki University Bulletin.
