Dear Editor,
Re: Sidewalks not as clear as Town suggests, letter to the editor, and Crews respond to hundreds of blocked storm drains, March 29
I am one of the people the letter and article presume to know. I had a visit from two sheriffs at 8:30 p.m. on a Friday after an anonymous neighbour complained about my sidewalk having not been cleared and my semi-antique car being ‘abandoned’ in front of my house.
So, I am apparently one of the individuals described in the article, whose parked car was shedding snow onto the roadway. I am also apparently one of the individuals described in the letter, who fails to maintain the sidewalks adjacent to their property.
Allow me to respond. My house is two doors downhill from a city-maintained drain, which has not been cleared all winter. The water that really wanted to enter that drain went around it, then followed gravity, jumping the curb and flooding my sidewalk and my next door neighbour’s.
Seeing this, I spent considerable effort chipping and scraping a path for the water to go out into the street, not across our sidewalks. I also spread lots of ice-melt on my sidewalk. This enabled my next-door neighbour to — after much additional use of ice-melt — clear his sidewalk.
At this point, my sidewalk had nearly four inches of ice on it, which was beyond my ability to clear. My ‘abandoned’ car had contributed exactly zero to this mess, yet when the sheriffs arrived, I was told I was generously being given a week to get it free… or it would be towed.
The good news: After my immediate neighbours heard of this, they held a barn-raising event. Saturday morning, several burly neighbours spent their day doing what the city hadn’t: clearing the blocked drain and releasing my sidewalk from its icy prison.
The offending vehicle was released several hours short of the sheriff-imposed deadline after a week of hard work trying to chip it out of the ice, which was not the result of runoff from the vehicle, but from buildup resulting from the uncleared drain.
I thank my many good neighbours who rallied to help me, and I ask that my other neighbour — like the letter writer — perhaps think about the larger situation, rather than griping that the road is easier to walk on than some sidewalks.
Yes, for many reasons, sometimes it is, but this time, it was absolutely not from lack of effort on our part. Please come talk to us next time. We can have a coffee together, neighbour.
Neil Petrunia
Okotoks
