SNOW MELTERS
NYC DEPARTMENT OF SANITATION
On January 25th, 2026 New York City was hit by a winter storm that dumped over a foot of snow across the five boroughs. As temperatures stubbornly remained below freezing for weeks afterward, the NYC Department of Sanitation made the decision to deploy eight of their twenty-seven snow melting machines to finally rid residents of the scourge of dirty urban glaciers clogging up our streets and sidewalks.
I decided to check out the melter that was set up on Broad Street in FiDi and was not expecting such a fast-paced operation— in the hour and a half I was there, the trucks never stopped dropping off more snow. Even though each machine can melt 240,000 pounds of the stuff per hour, the mountain never seemed to shrink!
A lot of people wonder why they don't just dump it directly into the harbor instead of using all this energy to melt it. The reality is that this snow is highly polluted with petrochemicals and microplastics among other contaminants from all of the cars driving over it, not to mention all the salt. These machines not only melt the snow, but they filter out the salt and small debris before dumping the resulting water directly into the sewer system where it will be treated before being discharged. Also, it turns out the water in these giant hot tubs only needs to be heated to 38F to get the job done.
