Ravenna Handles Recent Snow Conditions from KentWired.com on Vimeo.

Ravenna is seeing a lot of white this winter.

Over the past few weeks, more snow has stuck to the ground than the city can keep up with. City crews can only pile the snow so high before it creates problems downtown.

“People can’t get in to go shopping. Business owners can’t get in,” said Ravenna Street Superintendent Chuck Dowdy.

The city received 27 inches of snow in January.  Crews work day and night to clean up the streets and sidewalks.  Along with moving snow to the side of the street, workers load the snow onto trucks and transport it to another area just minutes from downtown.

The City of Ravenna Transfer Sight is located on Lake Avenue.  This area is where snow is moved to in the winter.  In the summer, residential yard waste is deposited there.  The amount of snow there is unknown, but Dowdy says the piles can be a high as 12 feet.

This transportation method is a solution the city is sticking with.

“We’ve even doing it for 8 years and they were doing it prior to that,” said Dowdy.  “It’s been decades we’ve done this.”

While this method is an expense, it’s also the most effective.

Dowdy said that some years, the snow piles at the transfer sight have reached so high that trucks have been able to drive on them to drop off snow.  Typically, the piles don’t melt until April or May.

If the transfer sight runs out of room, snow is also moved to an area behind the Ravenna Street Garage on Oakwood Street.

Contact Alex Valverde at [email protected]