This Trash-Covered Glacier Is A Monument To Boston’s Godawful Winter

This Trash-Covered Glacier Is A Monument To Boston’s Godawful Winter

Over the course of last winter, Boston’s snowploughs moved thousands of tons of snow (and trash) into ‘snow farms’ around the city, where it sat waiting to melt in warmer weather. Well, the warmer weather’s still here, and so is the snow.

As the New York Times documents, the ‘snow farm’ at Tide Street (seen in the above image on May 28th) is still very much here — only, thanks to all the trash embedded in it (and the passage of time), it’s now a trash-covered glacier, sitting in an empty lot in the middle of Boston. Despite 90-degree weather, there’s still some little remenants of winter lying around

This isn’t some tiny pile of snow that would barely chill a drink, either: people have been skiing down it (although the smell is so bad the skier “immediately had to go go burn his boots”), and the Times’ Katharine Seelye says that “standing next to it is like standing next to a freezer with the door open”.

The particularly disgusting part comes from the trash embedded in the snow pile: hundreds of tons of bicycles, manhole covers, and general crap swept up by snowplows, now frozen in place. City workers have been making weekly trips to haul away truckloads of the stuff. It’s also a particularly visible argument against dumping snow into the ocean, as some suggested during the winter.

In the time-honored spirit of ‘if you can’t fix a problem, make a hashtag instead’, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh has created the #BosMeltNow hashtag, inviting residents to guess when the pile will ultimately disappear. Current popular estimates peg it somewhere around late August or September, although it’s unclear at this time exactly how the city plans to decide when the trash-covered ice pile is really just a trash pile now.

[New York Times]

Image credit: AP


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