Moscow sees a lot of snow. But the snow-eater is for special occasions.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

[democratisphere]

1. Looks like a pretty efficient machine.

[Sinistrous]

2. When I was growing up,

about 60 years ago, the city where I was living used a nearly exact system to clear snow. It also worked to pick up leaves from the streets.

[CrispyQ]

3. I wonder what they do with the snow.

I live on a curve & when the snowplow comes by it piles all the icy, slushy crap from the street all over my walk. It makes shoveling a major PITA. Also, I never shovel until I'm sure the last plow has gone by. Amazingly there is an ordinance that we can't shovel our snow into the street. It has to go in our yard or removed some other way.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

6. The answer revealed:

Moscow sees a lot of snow. But the snow-eater is for special occasions.

World
Moscow sees a lot of snow. But the snow-eater is for special occasions.
A record blizzard swept through the Russian capital over the weekend. That means it was time for a ravenous machine to come out.

By Amie Ferris-Rotman
January 28 at 12:15 PM

MOSCOW — It is really winter in Russia when the snow-eater comes out. ... It seldom makes an appearance, but when it does, hissing and gobbling up snow with metal rods resembling arms, you know there must be a lot of white stuff on the streets.

That is exactly what happened over the weekend. In a period of 30 hours, 20 inches of snow was dumped on Moscow, causing flight cancellations and car accidents across the capital. The unrelenting blizzard even broke a 70-year record. ... For the snow-eater, whose Russian name translates as “pawed snow loader,” it was time to get to work.

As the one-manned vehicle creeps along the sides of roads, its size and sluggish speed mean it is almost exclusively seen at night. The “paws” shovel heaps of snow onto a conveyor belt that extends up over its back. A separate truck follows close behind, collecting the snow as they go.

In the Soviet era — when regular snowfall was more common than today — the machine was lovingly referred to as “golden hands” by adults. Children would simply call it “paws." ... Today, the snow is carried to one of Moscow’s 56 melting stations, where it is liquefied, filtered and released into the sewer system — a far cry from the beginning of the 21st century, when the snow was being dumped in the city’s rivers, severely polluting the water.
....

Natalia Abbakumova contributed to this report.

Amie Ferris-Rotman is the Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post. She was previously with Foreign Policy in Russia, and Reuters senior correspondent in Afghanistan. Follow https://twitter.com/Amie_FR

I can't link to the video in the WaPo article. Here's another video:

[CrispyQ]

15. Thank you!

[janterry]

8. I live on a main street and we don't have to plow the sidewalk

There is a sidewalk plow that comes along. Thank heavens! I tried shoveling when I first bought the house, and the street plow dumped all that on the sidewalk 4, 5 or more times during the day.

There was no way I could manage.

[JHB]

11. Dunno what the Rusians do, but NYC has melt trucks...

...or they're probably actually trailers. Use plows and payloaders to collect the snow into mounds, they have the payloaders dump it into the melter (which is positioned over a storm drain).

A bit more efficient than ye olde fashioned way, which was to do pretty much the same, but replace the melter with a long line of trucks hauling the snow to the river and then dumping it.

[Rhiannon12866]

13. I visited the USSR back in the late '80s

Went with my grandmother and her peace group. We had lovely guides everywhere we went, our main guide lived in Moscow. I asked her what they did with all the snow (we were there in September, no snow) since we have mammoth snowbanks here in New York - and she told me that they put it on trucks and carry it out of the city. We could sure use that in New York about now...

[Dennis Donovan]

14. Were those "lovely guides" speaking into their sleeve cuffs a lot?

Did any of the "guides" resemble this dog?

[Rhiannon12866]

18. I did meet lots of dogs, just not that one - I would have remembered!

I was told that the Russians love their dogs and our main guide, Tania, talked about her Afghan all the time. And I did learn after the fact that I did meet KGB. Nobody seemed all that interested in us, my grandmother's peace group, almost all senior citizens, but I have no doubt that they knew exactly what we did and where we went all the time. The trip was highly organized. Tania lived in Moscow and was with us there, joined our American guide and was with us the entire trip, and we had an additional city guide in each of the other 3 cities we visited. They were all knowledgeable and couldn't have been nicer.

And when we visited our small "sister city," 2 1/2 hours straight up in the Caucasus Mountains, we stopped about halfway down for dinner at the only place in the area available for a meal. It was obviously pretty remote, but they fed us well, as they did every place we went. While the others were wandering around and visiting the WWII museum there, something we saw in many places, an older man in a bathrobe sitting on a bench asked me about our group. Everyone had been friendly, as well as curious, and I had nothing to hide, so I just explained that we were an American peace group just having visited our sister city.

It wasn't until later when I mentioned the man's questions to someone else in our group that I learned that our dinner spot was actually a KGB getaway site - which explained a lot.

[onethatcares]

4. why not have it

go forward ?

[NurseJackie]

5. Looks like...

... the driver of the scooping machine is going forward. It's only the dump truck that follows slowly in reverse.

[FailureToCommunicate]

7. That's some serious backing skills by the dump driver (the two are not connected)!!

[Tommy_Carcetti]

9. I'm thinking this will be the next creative accidental death for some high profile Putin dissident.

Accidentally stepped in front of a Snow Eater.

[miyazaki]

10. Didn't I see this thing in that movie Caligula...

Except his version was plowing peoples heads.

[LeftInTX]

12. I wonder if that thing also eats the concrete?

[trof]

16. Saw a similar operation in Anchorage some years ago.

They trucked the snow to somewhere out of town.
The next year they had to truck snow IN for the start of the Iditarod.

[aikoaiko]

17. Flagstaff had something like this 20 years ago.

They plowed to the center, scooped it up into truck, hauled it away.

It was a smart system for not burying cars and sidewalks. The snow was actually removed.