The dust has been a big story in Quesnel this year as the Ministry of Environment has issued several advisories.
Matt Thomas, the Director of Operations, says the city’s sweeping program is well underway…
“We’ve been through the downtown core and still sweep the downtown core sort of early in the morning. We start sweeping at 4 am and then sweep until 4-30 pm. But there are some neighbourhoods we haven’t been into yet but we are working our way into neighbourhoods at this time.
Thomas says they typically go through most areas twice and the order in which they do things is along the lines of what they do for snow removal.
He says they also use water…
“Our sweepers have water storage on them so we use water with our sweepers, but then also if we’re into a heavy area we will use water trucks to try to keep the dust down as best we can.”
Thomas says the city does use a special sand downtown which has less fines in it to keep the dust down but it is a bit of a nature of the beast.
He says they run two sweepers to begin the program and once they’ve been through the whole area once, they will then limit the use of the second sweeper, but it will run from spring until fall.